Purpose Prize

Marc Freedman Portrait

The Latest from CoGenerate

New Survey Reveals Benefits of Older-Younger Tutoring Teams

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For the past year, Ampact, with support from CoGenerate’s Generations Serving Together program, placed cogenerational pairs of AmeriCorps members in elementary schools. The older and younger adults worked side by side to improve students’ reading and math skills. A...

The Billionaire Who Gave Away His Fortune Took a Big Chance on Us

The Billionaire Who Gave Away His Fortune Took a Big Chance on Us

We at CoGenerate (formerly Encore.org) are mourning the loss of Chuck Feeney this week. Without Chuck's vision and generosity we likely would not exist as an organization. Twenty-five years ago Atlantic Philanthropies took a chance on our start-up, playing a...

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Robert Moses

The Algebra Project, Inc.
Purpose Prize Fellow 2006

Assisting students in inner city and rural areas achieve mathematics literacy

From his work in an inner city school, Bob Moses recognized that mathematics literacy in today’s information age is as important to educational access and citizenship for inner city and rural poor middle and high school students as the right to vote was to political access and citizenship for sharecroppers and day laborers in Mississippi in the 1960s. In 1991, at age 56, Bob formally incorporated The Algebra Project, to develop hands on curricula and pedagogy; to inspire and train other teachers; to engage policy makers and research mathematicians, and to apply lessons learned from the Civil Rights Movement, making mathematics an organizing force for quality public school education for every child in the USA. By 1996, with considerable grant support, the Algebra Project had reached some 45,000 pupils, and its instructional materials were being used by teachers in 105 schools across the country. In 2005, at age 70, Bob catalyzed a convening at Howard University of 130 educators, academics, lawyers, economists, and community organizers in a multi-generational, cross discipline, cross class effort, giving birth to a campaign to engage the nation in a discussion about a constitutional amendment on education (first proposed by Ulysses S. Grant), under the banner of Quality Education as a Civil Right.