As a college student at Boston College, Tiffany Cooper Gueye had big ambitions to help close the gap between how white and minority kids perform in school.
“I always thought I wanted to do something about it before I had kids of my own,” said Ms. Gueye, who is African-American. “I don’t want my kids to grow up feeling like they’ll be on the low end of the achievement gap just because of the color of their skin, because of what statistics might say about how they’re supposed to perform.”
While still in school, she began working at Building Educated Leaders for Life, or BELL, a national nonprofit working to bring about educational equality by expanding learning time beyond the traditional school day and year.
In the years that followed, Ms. Gueye worked her way up, serving as a program manager, director of evaluation, and chief operating officer of field operations before becoming chief executive at age 28. She has helped expand the $22 million organization into a model for growth and comprehensive evaluation.
Now, at 37, her “impatience level” is high, she says. Her three young kids will soon start school, and there is still much work to be done.
But she can still point to progress made under her leadership: She has the data to prove it.
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“You need different types of evidence before you draw conclusions about a program or an intervention,” she says. BELL has participated in two randomized, controlled trials, with the nonprofit think tanks Urban Institute and MDRC.
While a lot of charity executives may puzzle over how to do such a comprehensive study, Ms. Gueye earned a Ph.D. in educational research and measurement and has been the driving force behind BELL’s focus on evaluation.
“We have an appetite for it that I think is unique,” she said.
In 2015, students in BELL summer programs increased an average of 20 percent in grade-level reading skills and 30 percent in math. The average American child loses two months’ worth in those subjects between school years.
With that evidence in hand, the organization has been able to bring in more supporters to help replicate programs and reach more kids.
A partnership with the YMCA of the USA entered its fourth year this summer, and thanks to partnerships with the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and San Mateo County and its Office of Education, its programs will expand to four Northern California school districts.
This summer, Ms. Gueye expects BELL’s programs will serve at least 16,000 young people in pre-K through eighth grade. She anticipates the organization will continue to grow at an accelerated rate, serving more children by 2018 through the programs its partners provide, rather than through its own direct programming.
Partners can take advantage of the program “without designing one from scratch and investing $3 million in their own” randomized, controlled trial, says Ms. Gueye. “They get to take advantage of the fact that we’ve done that for a long time.”
This is part of the On the Rise series, profiles of people making a difference in the nonprofit world.
This article has been corrected to say that Tiffany Cooper Gueye went to Boston College, not Boston University.
