December 3, 2007
The New Teacher Project Wins Fast Company Magazine and Monitor Group's Social Capitalist Award
NEW YORK –Fast Company magazine and Monitor Group announced today that they awarded one of their fifth annual Social Capitalist Awards to The New Teacher Project, a national non-profit organization that partners with school districts to attract and train high-quality teachers for low-performing schools. This year’s awards feature 45 non-profits that apply the tools of business to solve the world’s most pressing social problems – ranging from educational inequity to poor healthcare in developing nations to homelessness, unemployment and substance abuse – and who have demonstrated a consistent and unusually large impact on society.
“This year we’ve seen an explosion of diverse experiments, many of them engineered by onetime Wall Street heavies, that attempt to bring new capital – and capital-market dynamics – to the realm of social good,” said Fast Company Contributing Writer Keith Hammonds. “Through these deals, social entrepreneurs and businesses are raising the stakes, creating both business and social impact, and changing old-style capitalism as we know it.”
The New Teacher Project (TNTP) is a 130-person organization dedicated to increasing the number of outstanding individuals who become public school teachers and to creating environments for all educators that maximize their impact on student achievement. Since 1997, TNTP has recruited, trained, placed and/or certified approximately 28,000 teachers in partnership with over 200 school districts in 26 states. Today, TNTP is especially well known for its highly selective Teaching Fellows® programs, which attract and train accomplished career changers and recent graduates to become teachers for urban schools nationwide, as well as its incisive research of human capital issues in education.
“We are honored to win the 2008 Social Capitalist Award,” said Ariela Rozman, CEO of The New Teacher Project. “Over the past 10 years, The New Teacher Project has helped bring tens of thousands of qualified teachers to low-performing schools, advanced new methods of teacher training and certification, and proven that how and when teachers are hired has an impact on teacher quality. We are proud to be making a difference for students, schools and teachers across the country and grateful for Fast Company and Monitor Group’s recognition of our innovative approach and growing impact.”
For five years, Fast Company has partnered with global consulting firm Monitor Group to identify, evaluate, and celebrate top-performing nonprofit organizations. The Awards assess social entrepreneurial organizations of different sizes and ages across social sectors as an explicit effort to further performance measurement and accountability in the social sector in a highly rigorous, data driven, comparative approach. Organizations are rated on five critical components: social impact, entrepreneurship, innovation, aspiration and growth, and sustainability, based on an application that included two years of operating and audited financial data, a statement of mission and objectives, and answers to a survey to assess strategy and activities. Winners were selected by an independent advisory board of sector experts. In addition to the winners, the board also picked four high-potential organizations as “rising stars.”
The winners are featured in Fast Company’s December/January 2008 issue (on newsstands December 4 - Jan. 22, 2008) and will be recognized at a ceremony at the Westin Washington D.C. city Center on Jan. 8, 2008. The keynote speaker will be Adam Werbach, sustainability adviser to Wal-Mart and subject of Fast Company’s September cover story. The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship will honor J.B. Schramm, founder of College Summit as the winner of its 2008 “Outstanding Social Entrepreneur” award. The event will be sponsored by Dow.
This year, Fast Company also launched an experiment to assess the social performance of for-profit companies, using Monitor’s methodology. This experiment recognizes the reality that social entrepreneurship is not limited to the non-profit sector, and that companies are increasingly acting to have and measure positive impact on society, the environment, and their workforces. The magazine selected 10 companies to highlight.
Complete information on this year’s Social Capitalist Awards winners, including expanded profiles and links that let you make donations to the groups you find most compelling, can be found online at www.fastcompany.com/social/.
To view Fast Company's complete profile of The New Teacher Project, please visit http://www.fastcompany.com/social/2008/profiles/new-teacher-project.html.
About The New Teacher Project:
The New Teacher Project (TNTP) is a national non-profit organization that takes a holistic approach to addressing teacher quality in urban and high-poverty schools. Since its inception in 1997, TNTP has recruited, prepared, placed and/or certified approximately 28,000 new, high-quality teachers, established 55 programs or initiatives and worked with more than 200 school districts in 26 states. In 2007 alone, TNTP’s alternate route to certification programs received approximately 35,000 applications and recruited, trained and/or hired a total of 2,930 new teachers; most of these teachers were eligible to teach shortage subject areas such as math, science and special education. To date, TNTP estimates that its teachers have positively affected the education of some 2.9 million students nationwide. TNTP has also published two major studies on teacher hiring and school staffing in urban areas, and continues to conduct studies analyzing district policies and recommending reforms. For more information, visit www.tntp.org
About Fast Company magazine:
Founded in 1996 and acquired in 2005 by Mansueto Ventures, LLC, award-winning Fast Company magazine (www.FastCompany.com) covers the ideas, trends and visionaries that are sparking change and creating the future of business. With a total paid circulation of 746,161, Fast Company explores the profound innovation, creative breakthroughs, best and “next” practices that are driving the business world.
About Monitor Group:
Monitor Group is a leading global professional services firm working with corporations, governments, and social-sector organizations to help them drive growth. Employing over 1,500 people in 22 countries worldwide Monitor offers a blend of advisory, capability building and capital services. Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, Monitor can be reached at 617.252.2000 or on the web at www.monitor.com
