Funding collaborative Blue Meridian Partners has invested $60 million to help scale efforts to close financial equity gaps, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

Awarded through The Studio @ Blue Meridian, the funding will support organizations working to dismantle barriers that marginalized communities face in achieving an equitable recovery. Recipients include Benefits Data Trust, which connects eligible individuals and families to public benefits and helps them gain financial stability and improve their health; Beyond 12, whose digital coaching platform supports students from underrepresented backgrounds through college degree completion; CodePath, which offers free supplemental courses in cybersecurity, mobile app development, web development, and technical interview preparation; Grameen America, which provides affordable capital, credit- and asset-building supports, and financial education for entrepreneurial women; Management Leadership for Tomorrow, which prepares low- and moderate-income people of color to secure high-trajectory jobs that deliver economic mobility and enable them to transform their communities; Merit America, which offers flexible fourteen- to twenty-four-week online skill-building courses, coaching, and peer support; Per Scholas, which provides accelerated and job-specific bootcamp-style skills-building courses, followed by intensive hands-on technical training, professional development, financial security coaching; and Zearn, which supports teachers with research-backed curricula and digital lessons in math.

With the goal of supporting eighty thousand women business owners by 2030, Grameen America plans to use its $9.5 million grant to determine which approaches work best to gain the trust of Black women entrepreneurs, such as collaborating with churches, advocacy groups, or local governments. Instead of designing an elaborate formula for growth, Grameen America will use the "lean testing" method developed with coaching from Blue Meridian staff to try several approaches over the next three years.

Blue Meridian Partners, which selected the recipients with help from the consulting group Equity Lab, is using its Studio program to test how the broader organization might ensure it is not allowing its own internal biases to steer its grantmaking, chief investment and impact officer Jim Shelton, who was a longtime program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told the Chronicle. The process not only pushed Blue Meridian Partners to focus on including organizations led by people of color but also to ask deeper questions about potential grantees' commitment to racial equity.

"Do they actually understand the racial context of their work? Do they understand how racial equity and issues around race center in the work that they're doing? Do they take seriously the work that they need to do internally for themselves to create a culture where there are not issues of bias and or a lack of inclusion?" said Shelton. "It is meant to be sweeping, not just isolated to counting heads."