#dart foundation

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Dart Foundation Donates to Student Greenhouse

The Dart Foundation made a generous donation to the Common Ground Ministries non-profit after school program in Waxahachie, TX. The donation will go towards constructing a greenhouse for students to grow crops as well as learn more about agriculture.

The greenhouse project has been named the Stem Garden Program and it will utilize natural rainwater to help grow the crops in an environmentally friendly way. These crops will then go back to the school to help nourish the students with healthy meals. The excess crops will be donated to Waxahachie Care to feed the poor.

As an after-school tutoring and mentoring program, the Common Ground Ministries’ goal is to help students between the school years of kindergarten and fifth grade to learn accelerated reading, math, and other important skills.

While the greenhouse does help children to learn more about agriculture, the lessons learned will go beyond that as students learn self-reliance and a sense of community.

The Dart Foundation’s donation will help the non-profit fund the entire greenhouse project. Both the Common Ground Ministries and the Dart Foundation hope to have the project completed by this summer.

As a private family foundation, the Dart Foundation has always been supportive of STEM education programs. Their donations across the country have helped multiple schools to fund programs that better prepare students for the working world.

As a current board member and an advocate of STEM education programs, Ken Dart is a major reason as to why the Dart Foundation strives to improve education around the world. Students across the United States have obtained new educational programs thanks to his passion and generosity.

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Dart Foundation Promotes STEM Programs in Mexico

The Dart Foundation, in partnership with the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF), is working to improve or implement current STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) programs in schools across Mexico. The program prepares teachers to teach the new program effectively.

According to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey, Mexico still ranks in the bottom third of the world when it comes to subjects such as math and science.

Dart and PADF took note of this and realized what a difference they could make for the education system in Mexico. With the challenges of twenty-first century leaving many schools behind, Dart and PADF believe they can help change the narrative and increase the rankings of Mexican education programs.

Last week, 60 public school teachers graduate from the partnership program. They will be able to bring the lessons they learned in laboratory experiments, programming, and even robotics back to children across Mexico.

The Dart Foundation has been a major supporter of STEM programming. Their grants and donations to various educational causes across the U.S. have been imperative to the schooling of today’s youth. The foundation wants children around the world to have the opportunities to learn in STEM based education programs and build the skills that will help them succeed in the world.

Kenneth Dart, a current Dart Foundation board member, has been part of the reason why the foundation has been so invested in providing STEM programming around the world. His leadership together with his passion for education have allowed the Dart Foundation to donate millions of dollars to education programs around the world.

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Dart Foundation Supports High School STEM Program

The Dart Foundation recently awarded a grant of $5,000 to a high school in Texas. Waxahachie Global High School is to use the donation for VEX Robotics and Automated technologies. Global High School is a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) school and this project is the first stage in a larger plan to encourage girls, and people from minority or at-risk backgrounds to study STEM subjects and hopefully advance into related careers, specifically engineering and programming. Global High School focuses on these areas and students there learn about the theories of engineering and computer programming.

Companies in the technology industry are becoming increasingly aware of the lack of diversity in their workforces and are actively trying to recruit more skilled women and minorities. Google for example has a 70% male workforce and 61% of all employees are white. Google highlighted this problem in a bid to change it, and programs like the one in Waxahachie Global High School are the first step in getting there.

Ken Dart is a board member of the Dart Foundation which was established by his parents, Claire and William Dart, in 1984. It was founded and is headquartered in their home town of Mason, Michigan. The foundation aims to promote and advance youth education, particularly in the STEM subject area. That is why this donation is perfect in keeping with the Dart Foundation’s values and goals and will be used to increase the numbers of students entering these fields and their levels of competence and competitiveness at the university level.