Fox Chapel receives $50,000 national Moonshot Grant

The Fox Chapel Area School District, in partnership with the Center for Innovation in Education, has been awarded a $50,000 Remake Learning National Moonshot Grant. The funds will support an initiative titled “Building the Village: Schools as Infrastructure for Community Prosperity.”

During the next year, the Fox Chapel Area School District and the Center for Innovation in Education will co-create a prototype of a Community Impact Council, a coordinating body comprising students, the school district. municipal partners, and community organizations. The group will explore what it would take for the Fox Chapel Area to become a Blue Zone, a community where people live measurably longer, healthier, and more connected lives because of the environments and social structures around them. Two products will result: a Community Prosperity Roadmap to help ensure that isolated efforts compound into measurable community progress, and a shared accountability scorecard to gather early, trackable signs that the community is moving toward Blue Zone conditions.

“This work will create a school-community partnership where the district isn’t just a venue for programs, but a genuine engine of shared prosperity,” says Dr. Mary Catherine Reljac, Fox Chapel Area School District superintendent. “Fox Chapel Area students already demonstrate extraordinary leadership capacity. This initiative asks, ‘What happens when we give that capacity a real coordination role on a wider scale, not as a future aspiration, but now?’”

The Center for Innovation in Education, founded in 2013, supports education leaders to create durable, community-owned solutions to complex problems.

The Remake Learning National Moonshot Grants are made possible by the Grable Foundation, Siegel Family Endowment, Richard King Mellon Foundation, The Heinz Endowments and The Buhl Foundation. Remake Learning stewards the Pittsburgh learning ecosystem and advances the future of learning worldwide. Since 2021, Remake Learning has awarded Moonshot Grants to 130 projects, totaling more than $5.75 million in investment in bold ideas with the potential to shape the future of teaching and learning.