The New York Foundation Quietly Funding a Nationwide Network of Creative Teaching Fellows Nobody’s Written About Yet

Some institutions function best when no one is around. It’s not because it has anything to conceal, but rather because attention tends to complicate things: funders become anxious, bureaucracies become possessive, and the meticulous, slow process of creating something genuine is disrupted by the cacophony of people suddenly vying for credit. This has always been understood by the New York Foundation, which was quietly founded in 1909 with a million-dollar bequest from a man most people have never heard of.

The majority of readers have probably scrolled past its name twelve times without pausing. And it’s most likely intentional.

It is more difficult to sum up what the Foundation has been constructing—through a combination of core grants, fellowship support, and strategic partnerships—than a press release would imply. It goes beyond simply providing funding for art. It’s supporting educators who teach art and who think that creativity is more closely related to the structural basis of human learning than a supplemental subject to be eliminated when funds are tight. Making that case to a school board is more difficult. A teaching fellow standing in a Bronx classroom at seven in the morning, wondering if any of this will matter, would find it easier to make this point.

A helpful window into what this type of work actually looks like on the ground is provided by the NYC Teaching Fellows program, which is run independently but in philosophically related areas by the city’s Department of Education. Due in part to a state class size requirement that is compelling the city to hire at a rate it hasn’t tried in decades, nearly a thousand participants trained this past summer, double the number from the previous year. Recent graduates, former case managers, former accountants, and career changers. People who decided they wanted to do something that felt important after taking stock of their lives. One of them, Kimba Williams, a 44-year-old who had worked in foster care for years, joined because he wanted to be a visible and encouraging presence for Black boys in schools. That is not a goal of policy. It’s a human one.

However, the summer wasn’t without its problems. Fellows accumulated credit card debt and borrowed from family members while the Education Department sent ambiguous assurances regarding “transitions to new payment structures.” Stipends of up to $4,500 were promised and then postponed. Williams used all of his credit cards. Another man, a former accountant, borrowed $6,500 from relatives and couldn’t tell them when he would be able to repay them. It’s the kind of circumstance that causes people to reevaluate everything—not because they don’t believe in the mission, but rather because the organization in charge of carrying it out was unable to deliver a check on time.

There is a sense that this specific failure highlights a significant difference between the administrative apparatus that is meant to support such programs and the idealism that drives them. A different organization, the New York Foundation for the Arts, has been working in parallel, providing support not to teachers but to artists and arts administrators whose work eventually finds its way into classrooms, curricula, and the cultural imaginations of students who might never know where the ideas originated. A few years ago, Austin Bunn, a professor at Cornell, was awarded a NYFA fellowship for screenwriting, which he described as recognition for a genre that is rarely honored—no Pulitzer, no Guggenheim, no literary awards for screenwriting. Small interventions, such as that fellowship, add up.

This experiment has been carried out in Indiana by the state’s Arts Commission, which has established a network of educators with training in creativity and arts integration. The Merwin Creative Teaching Fellows have been quietly bringing educators in Hawaii together around concepts of focus, creativity, and learning that are grounded in nature. These programs don’t speak loudly to one another. There isn’t a unified brand, a national summit, or a trending hashtag on any platform. It’s still unclear if this fragmentation keeps the work close to the ground, makes it more difficult to co-opt, and makes it more difficult to defund in a single budget cycle.

What is evident is that the participants in these programs—the fellows, the grantees, the career changers who borrowed money from their relatives to spend a summer learning how to run a classroom—believe something that the larger education debate frequently finds difficult to express: that teaching is a creative act and that treating it as a purely technical one results in teachers quitting, disengaged students, and schools that serve as holding environments rather than places where real things happen. For more than a century, the New York Foundation has placed bets on that conviction. With $55,000 grants and long-term commitments that most funders won’t touch, quietly and consistently.
It’s worth writing about. Even if, particularly if, no one has as of yet.