It’s a few weeks out from the start of school and purple paint is still going up on the walls at FORWARD Girls Leadership Academy — an all-girls charter high school coming to Cleveland’s Union-Miles Park neighborhood.
The school is one of a growing number of charter schools that have gotten help from Future Ready Cleveland, a new education nonprofit led by Holly Trifiro, Mayor Justin Bibb’s former chief of education.
Over the past two years, the organization has quietly stepped up efforts to reshape Cleveland’s education landscape.
For FORWARD’s founding principal, Luciana Gilmore, that help has meant having Trifiro alongside her as she turned an idea for an East Side girls school focused on leadership into one preparing to welcome students next week.
“It’s been a partnership,” Gilmore said. “And so all along the way, she’s been on the journey with me.”
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Future Ready says its larger goal is to make sure Cleveland children have access to high-quality schools in every neighborhood, regardless of who operates them. That means working with publicly funded charters, private schools and Cleveland’s public schools.
The nonprofit doesn’t directly open or operate schools. Instead, it works as an intermediary: giving out grants, researching school quality by neighborhood, piloting new ideas and making information available to help parents make decisions about their children’s education.
Its primary funder is City Fund, a national organization that has made big investments to expand and improve charter schools. City Fund gave Future Ready a combined $1.7 million of its $2.5 million in revenue during its first year of operation in 2024, according to public tax documents.
City Fund launched in 2018 and is among the largest philanthropic spenders on K-12 education nationwide. Its big backers include the Netflix founder Reed Hastings and Texas philanthropist John Arnold. Donors with a Cleveland connection include the Haslam 3 Foundation, run by Jimmy and Dee Haslam, who own the Cleveland Browns.
The national nonprofit’s goal is to “help incubate and grow great public charter schools while creating systemic improvements to reach students citywide,” according to its website. City Fund has given money to charter schools directly and to local organizations that promote high quality charter schools in 24 cities nationwide.
City Fund added Cleveland in 2024 when it was looking to move to more Midwestern cities. But, Trifiro said, “they’re not driving decisions.” Future Ready is focused on school quality rather than pushing a single agenda or school model, she said in an interview with Signal Cleveland.
Right now, Future Ready is defining high quality with the Ohio state report card ratings; specifically, they consider 4- and 5-star schools to be high quality. The nonprofit wants to eventually get to a place where it can work alongside parents to evaluate and define school quality.
Aside from the help it’s given charters, Future Ready also met recently with the Cleveland Metropolitan School District about a potential partnership and is working on a pilot program in some private schools to train paraprofessionals to become teachers.
Leah Hudnall, a former Cleveland public school board member and partner at Future Ready, said the organization is willing to take risks but will pivot if parents and students say what they are doing isn’t working. She called out the decades-long consequences of reforms that haven’t led to quality education for all Cleveland kids.
“We still haven’t really turned the corner on quality,” Hudnall said. “When you look generationally, it’s time to turn the corner.”
Who works at Future Ready?
The new non-profit lists four employees on its website:
- Holly Trifiro, the former chief of education to Mayor Justin Bibb, CEO.
- Leah Hudnall, a former CMSD school board member, partner for public engagement.
- Aditi Garg, the school board chair at Breakthrough Public schools, partner for talent and strategy initiatives.
- Riley Selig-Addiss, director of policy, research and impact.
Board members include: Ken Surratt, CRO at Cleveland United Way; Richard Gibson, senior pastor of Elizabeth Baptist Church; Cynthia Tancer, who helped co-found Honesty for Ohio Education and Maura Marino, a partner at City Fund. As of the nonprofit’s 2024 tax filings, Lora Cover, the school board chair in Shaker Heights and a former human resources consultant for CMSD was also listed on the board, but she has since stepped down. [This story was updated with information about the nonprofit’s board on Aug. 20 at 4:30 p.m.]
Future Ready is funding charter schools and bringing them to Cleveland
Future Ready has already given grants to at least three charter or charter-like schools. Trifiro has also traveled across the country visiting charter schools to recruit them to Cleveland.
In addition to giving funding to Gilmore’s project, it gave a $114,000 planning grant to a charter-like school in Rootstown called Bio-Med Science Academy. (Rootstown, in Portage County, is home to NEOMED, which offers degrees in medicine, pharmacy and other health-related fields.)
The goal of that grant was to help the school open a Cleveland branch in 2027. But Stephanie Lammlein, the school’s chief administrative officer, wrote to Signal Cleveland in an email that there are no finalized plans to expand to the city.
Future Ready also gave a similar grant of $109,500 to Rooted School in 2024, a network of charter schools founded in New Orleans that now has schools in four states.
Trifiro approached Rooted around three years ago with an invitation to fill some of the educational needs she was seeing in Cuyahoga County, according to Jonathan Johnson, the network’s founder.
She also wrote a letter in late 2023 supporting the school’s application to a federal grant program that funds the expansion of charter schools. That application, written when Trifiro was still working as an independent consultant, mentions her work advising the Haslam Family Foundation and City Fund on education investments in Cleveland. It also lists the Haslam Family Foundation as a potential funder of Rooted’s Cleveland school.
Trifiro told Signal Cleveland one of the things she often hears from students is the need for an education that can lead to a career with the earning potential to support a family.
Rooted’s schools are highly focused on workforce readiness and offer students career pathways designed in collaboration with local employers, which Johnson listed is among the reasons it is looking to come to Cleveland.
Its Cleveland school will be headed by Tim Jones, the former principal at Davis Maritime and Aerospace, a CMSD high school. It will train students for careers in manufacturing and healthcare.
Trifiro also met with GEO Academies, a charter school network based in Indianapolis.
Kevin Teasley, the CEO of the network, told Signal Cleveland he had met with Trifiro and City Fund about expanding to Cleveland starting around two years ago.
“We didn’t just decide last week or two weeks ago to go to Cleveland,” Teasley said. “The person that actually invited us to come to Cleveland is Holly Trifiro.”
Future Ready Cleveland has not granted any funding to GEO, and Trifiro said that the school is not in the organization’s portfolio, though she met with it’s leaders as part of the process Future Ready conducts when considering working with a new school.
The nonprofit charter network started in Indianapolis and operates schools in Gary, Indiana, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Its model tries to get students ready for college by having them take as many college classes as possible while they’re still in high school.
Teasley also did his own homework before making the decision to bring GEO here. He met with local leaders, including people in the mayor’s office and the provost at Cleveland State University, Nigamanth Sridhar, who also sits on the CMSD school board.
In addition to giving grants to charter schools, in 2024, Future Ready gave $200,000 to the Drexel Fund, a group that funds the start up of private schools in underserved communities, and $100,000 to Teach for America in Cleveland.
The national group funding Future Ready spends heavily on charter schools
Early backers of City Fund embraced what’s called the “portfolio model” of education reform and, with it, charter school expansion.
That model decentralizes control over schools and lets parents choose from an array of schools that operate with autonomy. The schools are held accountable, largely through test scores and the threat of closure, by a “portfolio” manager that can be the traditional public school district or another organization. In a way, all schools are treated more like charter schools under this model.
Since its founding, City Fund has invested in two dozen cities, oftentimes through giving out large grants to local nonprofits like Future Ready.
In doing so, it’s followed what Sarah Reckhow, a professor at Michigan State who has studied how philanthropy changes public education, described as a “playbook” that nonprofits and foundations pushing the portfolio model and other kinds of school reforms have used.
“This is a playbook, in effect,” Reckhow said. “Having a nonprofit based in a particular city or school district that kind of plays this intermediary role, where they receive the funds from outside.”
Future Ready Cleveland isn’t going to push a “top down” approach, like the portfolio model, both Trifiro and Hudnall told Signal Cleveland. For now, it’s focused on school quality and making information available to families so they can make informed decisions about schools, since Cleveland is already a city where families are used to an open choice system.
In other places, where City Fund, and it’s backers, have aided local nonprofits, those groups and their partners have also lobbied for changes to local education policy or spent money in local school board races. For example, Indianapolis switched to a common enrollment system for charter schools and traditional public schools, due in part to the work of a similar nonprofit, MindTrust, according to reporting from Chalkbeat, which reports on education issues.
Often they fund that lobbying or political work through a partner called City Fund Action – which is a different type of nonprofit called a 501(c)(4) — that has less strict rules for political spending. In Cleveland, City Fund Action has given $125,000 to a local organization called Future Ready Cleveland Coalition, the 501(c)(4) associated with Future Ready.
Future Ready, Trifiro said, has also started to talk to organizations that sponsor or oversee charter schools about making sure those schools also hit a higher mark. Holding lower-performing charters and their authorizers accountable would require changes to state law, she said.
The organization’s goal, Trifiro and Hudnall underscored, is to address the ways the city has “dropped the ball” on listening when families said the current education options aren’t working for their kids.
“There is no perfect number of schools for the city of Cleveland,” Trifiro said. “What we’re really focused on is quality.”
Signal Cleveland Government Reporter Nick Castele contributed to this story.
