About Us

2007

The Siegel Charitable Foundation is created.

2011

We were granted our 501(c)(3) status and were renamed Siegel Family Endowment.

2012 – 2014

We embarked on our inaugural grantmaking years. Some of our first grantee organizations were MIT, New York City FIRST, and the Scratch Foundation (then called Code-to-Learn).

2015

We hired our founding Executive Director and created our first mission: “To ensure education is increasingly relevant to today’s technology driven society. To advance creative and innovative approaches to learning through technology.” We also developed our first signature interest areas: Computational Thinking, EdTech, and Career Readiness.

2016

We grew our staff, refined our mission to its current form, added “Open Learning” as an interest area, launched a new visual identity, and continued to grow and diversify our portfolio of grantees in an effort to make sure Siegel was built to last.

2017-2018

Sensing a growing need among organizations that are tackling internet health, digital and data rights, information integrity, and others, we began forming partnerships with a range of technology-engaging organizations. We also doubled down on our commitment to the computer science movement by incubating CSforALL in house. 

2019

Katy Knight took over as Executive Director. We further refined and articulated our scientific approach to grantmaking, one driven by questions and a quest to learn rather than promote pre-defined solutions.  

2020

Covid rocked the foundations of our world and work, and increased the urgency of our mission. We launched our multidimensional infrastructure portfolio area, with a seminal whitepaper that unpacks the need to define, design, govern, and fund infrastructure differently in the next century than we have in the previous. Read our 2020 Year in Review.

2021

We stood up an in-house research team, laid out our rationale and approach, brought on our inaugural cohort of fellows, and partnered with a number of mission-aligned grantees. Read our 2021 Year in Review. 

2022

We further refined our strategy, nearly doubled the size of our team, and set a record in grantmaking. We also launched our second whitepaper, Schools as Community Infrastructure, which offers a vision for schools and learning as vital public goods, and introduced a refreshed Workforce Strategy that asks how we might put equity at the center of the economy. Read our 2022 in Review.

2023

2023 was a year of organizational growth, exploration, and reflection.  We invested in understanding the lessons from the last few years of grantmaking in our post-pandemic reality and growing our research, grantmaking, and external engagement teams to meet the unique moment of technological transformation head-on. Read our 2023 in Review.

2024

We established a Knowledge and Impact team to maximize insights and learning across our work, developing tailored learning plans for individual grants and implementing coordinated tracking systems between grantees and our organization to streamline workflows. We also focused on strengthening collaboration between Research and Grantmaking teams and launched the fourth iteration of the Siegel Research Fellows program. Read our 2024 Year in Review. Read our 2024 in Review.