Hugh Green Foundation And Stonefields Collaborative Trust Break Ground In The Philanthropic Space With New Partnership

Hugh Green Foundation (HGF) and Stonefields CollaborativeTrust (SCT) have broken new ground in the philanthropic and education sectors with the first large-scale social impact investment made by a philanthropic foundation in New Zealand.

Hugh Green will be investing in Stonefield Collaborative Trust’s cutting edge cloud-based technology solution: SchoolTalk. The Collaborative designed and developed SchoolTalk in conjunction with the team at Stonefields School. SchoolTalk automates much of the teaching, learning and assessment cycle to provide visibility of learning progress for teachers, students and parents/whanau.

Specifically, the platform has been designed to help accomplish four things:

1. Increase teacher effectiveness and efficiency

2. Develop student agency

3. Provide data and analytics to inform improvement

4. Support home-school partnerships in learning

The sustainable partnership with the promise of a return is the first of its kind in New Zealand, and the structure allows for a philanthropic foundation to invest their capital to support the next stage of development of the platform and achieve substantial growth. This partnership is creating a business model that is both socially impactful and commercially sustainable. Stonefields Collaborative Trust

CEO, Judy Newcombe, says she hopes this will pave the way for more investment like this in the education space in the future. “Te Kete Hono - SchoolTalk is a social impact enterprise: it retains its focus on improving equity and educational excellence and its kaupapa of collaboration, while seeking to provide its owners with a sustainable return so that they can continue to do their important philanthropic work well into the future.”

The Hugh Green Foundation is a charitable trust set up in 1998 with the aim of improving the health and wealth of local communities. Their aim is to ensure that all children thrive, through assisting with the funding of innovative solutions and partnerships with organisations such as Stonefields Collaborative Trust.

The Stonefields Collaborative is a charitable trust set up to provoke thought and action about learning and leading. In addition to developing and supporting SchoolTalk, the Trust offers educational consultancy and professional learning for school leaders and teachers, and is accredited as a Ministry of Education PLD provider.

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