Cambiar Thrive's "Big Ideas Challenge" Aims to Fuel Student Success by Closing the Education Information Gap for Students and Families

New Funding Opportunity Seeks Catalytic Solutions to Address Data Demand

SAN DIEGO, July 23, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Cambiar Education, with support from the Walton Family Foundation, Bezos Family Foundation, and Lemnis, today announced the launch of the Thrive Big Ideas Challenge, a national competition designed to catalyze transformative solutions that empower students and caregivers with data to fuel student success. By collectively addressing the critical need for more - and actionable - information sharing with students and caregivers, the Thrive Challenge aims to profoundly boost student learning, ultimately giving them the agency to support their lifelong growth and shape their futures.

The Thrive Challenge will award $100,000 grants, with a subset of grantees eligible for $250,000+ of follow-on funding, to organizations with groundbreaking ideas on how to provide students and/or caregivers with easy-to-obtain, meaningful, and actionable information about their student's K-12 education and development. This funding opportunity focuses on two distinct tracks:

Student Track: Grantees that equip students with greater insight into their own data and ways students can use it to take action and make decisions.
Caregiver Track: Grantees that equip parents and caregivers with innovative and scalable tools to better understand and support their children's learning journeys. 

To learn more and submit a big idea for consideration, visit Cambiar Thrive's application portal. Applications will be accepted through August 31, 2025.

As technology advances and social isolation increases, demand for student data is growing. Recent reports indicate a troubling decline in youth engagement in the classroom.¹ "Student agency - the ability to make choices about one's learning and take an active role in shaping educational experiences - is a critical component of engagement in learning. Yet, many students feel like they have no control over their learning."² Arming students with their own data will initiate ways for them to take ownership of their learning, advancing the development of their agency and ability to thrive.

Motivated to go beyond report cards and teacher conferences, parents and caregivers are actively seeking more data when it comes to their children's academic and non-academic experiences.³ "Parents can only act on what they know," explains Bibb Hubbard, Founder and CEO of Learning Heroes, a Thrive grantee focused on strengthening relationships between parents and educators to improve student success. "Until parents have access to more than report card grades to measure their child's progress, they may not have a complete picture of how their child is achieving and may be stymied from taking the actions best suited for their child's specific learning needs."

"We believe that when data is accessible, well-understood, and actively used, it becomes a powerful tool for driving student achievement and fostering meaningful family engagement," said Christina Heitz, Founder and CEO of Cambiar Education. "The Thrive Big Ideas Challenge is a call to action for innovators to bridge the student information gap by blending digital and human approaches, and create a driving force that helps unlock the power of every learner." 

The Thrive Challenge supports Cambiar Education's broader commitment to changing the way K-12 education data works for students and caregivers and builds on the insights and momentum from Cambiar Thrive's previous cohort, which focused on improved data sharing specifically with parents and caregivers. These Thrive grantees, for example, are making significant progress in engaging parents and caregivers with student data to improve student outcomes:

• Thrive grantee Paloma Learning has made significant strides in engaging caregivers as teaching partners for their children, unlocking a world of instructional time that otherwise lays dormant. A recent study found that families using Paloma helped their children make 41% more reading growth and 39% more growth in math than a matched control group. Multilingual learners nearly doubled their progress.

• Thrive funding helped TalkingPoints add to their suite of evidence that their platform decreases absenteeism, with the most significant impact on under-resourced students and the families serving them. A recent study with their partners at Tulsa Public Schools showed a decrease of 24% in absenteeism rates using TalkingPoints.

• Rock by Rock provides a library of project-based learning experiences that sit at the intersection of academic skills, life habits, and student sense of purpose and belonging and is building out a platform that supports parents and microschool founders to measure holistic learning and increase family communication. As a result of their pilot, the assessment framework was rated 10 out of 10 by caregivers, and 90% of educators would recommend their development of the Academic Dashboard.

• NACA Inspired Schools Network (NISN) is a national organization focused on transforming Indigenous education by creating a network of schools that integrate cultural relevance with academic rigor. As part of its movement to create excellent schools relevant to the communities they serve, they piloted a community-led assessment that engaged families, students, and school staff in a data-driven process to identify measurable school outcomes. This assessment process will ultimately be used across all NISN schools to improve graduate capstones and guide teacher inquiry. NISN schools report graduation rates 5%-18% above the State Native American baseline.

• Thrive grantee Families in Action is igniting parent confidence and reading at home through "Lit for Literacy," a family-led partnership. In 2024, 88% of students whose parents became Family Literacy Champions through Lit for Literacy made 30-100 points of literacy gain in one year.

The Thrive Challenge seeks applicants whose big ideas are designed to improve student outcomes and collect evidence to show if students see gains - academic or otherwise - when they and/or caregivers are more engaged. The ability to track and assess quantitative and qualitative results and how students and/or caregivers are taking action as a result of the solution is a key component for the Thrive Challenge. Insight into how and and why the solution is used and what needs improvement enables productive and ongoing feedback loops, making the solutions more effective throughout the grant - and beyond.

Successful proposals will:

• Demonstrate potential for innovative, systemic change in school communities.
• Offer sustainable and scalable solutions that are fresh, practical, and grounded in community needs.
• Articulate how a solution supports all students and/or caregivers to understand and act on student data.
• Focus on improving student outcomes through student and/or caregiver data engagement.

MEDIA CONTACT
Carla Punsalan McLoughlin
[email protected]

¹ Gallup. (2024, May 13). Schools struggle to engage Gen Z students. Retrieved from https://news.gallup.com/poll/648896/schools-struggle-engage-gen-students.aspx
² James, M. P., & Frome, H. (2025, June 3). How student agency can boost engagement and readiness. Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/660503/student-agency-boost-engagement-readiness.aspx
³ Felton, M. (2022, February 22). Parents are getting access to student data, but how can we support them to use it? Data Quality Campaign. https://dataqualitycampaign.org/how-can-we-support-parent-engagement-with-student-data/

About Cambiar Education
Cambiar Education is a nonprofit K-12 venture studio built to change the marketplace for education innovation to prove undeniably that every student can succeed and thrive. It propels groundbreaking ventures charting the future of education led by founders with unshakeable optimism and courage. Cambiar cultivates a community of over 100 connected ventures, operating at the speed of innovation to make an impact and anchored in a commitment to creating solutions for our most vulnerable youth.

About the Walton Family Foundation
The Walton Family Foundation is, at its core, a family-led foundation. Three generations of the descendants of our founders, Sam and Helen Walton, and their spouses work together to lead the foundation and create access to opportunity for people and communities. We work in three areas: improving education, protecting rivers and oceans and the communities they support and investing in our home region of Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta. To learn more, visit waltonfamilyfoundation.org and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and X.

About the Bezos Family Foundation
The Bezos Family Foundation is a private foundation created by Mike and Jackie Bezos and their family. Since 2000, the Foundation has partnered with remarkable organizations and individuals to transform how we prepare young people from prenatal to young adulthood to pursue their own path for success and meaningfully contribute to society. In addition to grantmaking, the Foundation runs two in-house programs: Bezos Scholars Program and Vroom.

About Lemnis
Lemnis is a public charity dedicated to expanding learning for all. Our vision is to create a future of the Unlimited Learner, where every young person can thrive in a time of dramatic change. Lemnis, whose name is inspired by the lemniscate (∞), believes that to unlock limitless possibilities for learners, we must create a sense of belonging and community, apply findings from neuroscience of learning and social sciences, leverage pro-social artificial intelligence and digital technology, and generate new ecosystems and supports that are learner centered. Lemnis invests in and partners with organizations that advance these beliefs by creating authentic and relevant connections between learning and opportunity, supporting learners holistically, and expanding how we define and measure learner success. For more information, visit www.lemnis.org.

SOURCE Cambiar Education