Venture Capital Jobs and Internships at Education Innovation Ventures

ECMC Foundation is a national foundation working to improve postsecondary outcomes for students from underserved communities. ECMC Foundation makes investments in two focus areas: college success and career readiness; and uses a spectrum of funding structures, including strategic grantmaking and program-related investments, to invest in both nonprofit and for-profit ventures.

Launched in 2018, ECMC Foundation’s Education Innovation Ventures (EIV) program provides catalytic, risk capital to early-stage ventures working to increase postsecondary educational outcomes and economic mobility among learners who face systemic barriers. Through program-related investments, EIV’s capital generates impact alongside financial returns, which are recycled to fund further impact initiatives and drive changes in educational attainment and economic mobility for learners.

Investment Strategy and Objectives

EIV provides flexible, risk capital to early-stage ventures and entrepreneurs working to seed innovations, prove new models, and enable ventures to scale their impact. Our early-stage investments are designed to support ventures focused on improving postsecondary persistence and completion and/or job attainment at family-sustaining wages, specifically for learners and jobseekers who face systemic barriers to economic mobility.

Since launching in 2018, EIV’s investments have allowed the Foundation to tap into the creative power of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors through social enterprises working on college persistence and success, alternative postsecondary education financing, career exploration, upskilling and training, and equitable hiring initiatives. The investment thesis builds upon learnings from the Foundation’s grantmaking portfolios on College Success and Career Readiness.

EIV makes several types of investments:

• Direct Investments: the Foundation invests capital into social enterprises that serve learners and jobseekers
• Fund Investments: capital is deployed to funds that reinvest capital into social ventures
• Donor Advised Funds (DAF) Investments: capital is sent through a donor advised fund and invested into social ventures

Education Innovation Venture’s Five-Point Model

EIV considers ventures that demonstrate a commitment to delivering intentional, sustained and measurable social impact, and align with the Foundation's mission of inspiring and facilitating improvements in postsecondary education for underestimated learners. We look for the following criteria in our investments:

1. Impact: A measurable strategy for driving educational outcomes and economic mobility for students from underserved backgrounds and markets; a commitment to sharing lessons learned with the greater education sector.
2. Risk & Innovation: Early-stage ventures with transformative and disruptive products and services that address an unmet market need.
3. Scalability: Ventures with sustainable business models using market-based approaches that need access to patient capital in order to achieve scale.
4. Leverage: Ventures that test new and bold ideas with the potential to attract additional sources of capital to grow impact.
5. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Intentionality around building a diverse and inclusive body of leadership and practicing strong internal social governance.

Special Initiative: Innovative Financing Models

Beginning in 2021, ECMC Foundation will invest up to $2.5 million through Education Innovation Ventures into short-term training and education programs that use alternative financing models to accelerate the upskilling and retraining needed for America’s unemployed workforce to find gainful employment and attain family-sustaining wages. Learn more about why we are investing in Innovative Financing Models.