Our History
From our earliest grants to our most recent inquiries, this history reflects over fifteen years of learning at Siegel Family Endowment—shaped by curiosity, evidence, and the belief that systems can change.
The Siegel Charitable Foundation is created.
Obtained our 501(c)(3) status and were renamed Siegel Family Endowment.
Our inaugural grantmaking years. Some of our first grantee organizations were MIT, New York City FIRST, and the Scratch Foundation (then called Code-to-Learn).
We hired our founding Executive Director and created our first mission: “To ensure education is increasingly relevant to today’s technology driven society. To advance creative and innovative approaches to learning through technology.” We also developed a few signature interest areas: Computational Thinking, EdTech, and Career Readiness.
Grew our staff, refined our mission to its current form, added “Open Learning” as an interest area, launched our first visual identity, and continued to grow and diversify our portfolio of grantees in an effort to make sure Siegel was built to last.
Sensing a growing need among organizations that are tackling internet health, digital and data rights, information integrity, and others, we began forming partnerships with a range of technology-engaging organizations. We also doubled down on our commitment to the computer science movement by incubating CSforALL in house.
Katy Knight took over as Executive Director. We further refined and articulated our scientific approach to grantmaking, once driven by questions and a quest to learn rather than pre-defined solutions. We relaunched our visual identity accordingly to the one we still use today.
Covid rocked the foundations of our world and work, and increases the urgency of our mission. We launched our multidimensional infrastructure portfolio area, with a seminal whitepaper that unpacks the need to define, design, govern, and fund infrastructure differently in the next century than we have in the previous. Read our 2020 Year in Review.
We stood up an in-house research team, laying out our rationale and approach, bringing on our inaugural cohort of fellows, and bringing on mission-aligned grantees. Read our 2021 Year in Review.
A growth year, as we further refined our interest areas and approach, nearly doubled the size of our team, and set a record in grantmaking. We also launched our second organizational whitepaper, Schools as Community Infrastructure, which offers a vision for schools as learning as vital public goods, and the implications that has on how we deliver on our vision for equitable education. Finally, we introduced a refreshed Workforce Strategy that asks how we might put equity at the center of the innovation economy. Refresh of workforce strategy. Read our 2022 in Review.
2023 was a year of organizational growth, exploration, and reflection. We invested in understanding the lessons from the last few years of grantmaking in our post-pandemic reality and growing our research, grantmaking, and external engagement teams to meet the unique moment of technological transformation head-on. Read our 2023 in Review.
We established a Knowledge and Impact team to maximize insights and learning across our work, developing tailored learning plans for individual grants and implementing coordinated tracking systems between grantees and our organization to streamline workflows. We also focused on strengthening collaboration between Research and Grantmaking teams and launched the fourth iteration of the Siegel Research Fellows program. Read our 2024 in Review.
In 2025, we focused on expanding our international reach through major convenings and global partnerships, while continuing to invest in AI research, public interest technology infrastructure, and community-centered approaches to technology design. We continued to build bridges between technology development and governance and community impact, convening stakeholders from the UN to grassroots organizations around questions of equitable tech and AI futures.