Exciting news! Today, Chase Bank announced the 100 winners in Round 1 of its Community Giving Challenge on Facebook.  Among the finalists: your favorite donor-driven educational charity, The Generation Project!  

For winning Round 1, The Generation Project will receive a $25,000 grant from Chase.  Words can't adequately express how we feel right now.  Thankfully, though, we have this picture of a donor's gift being implemented at Chicago's Loomis Elementary School that will suffice.  We, like them, are very excited by money:

 

 

We owe a tremendous debt to all of our amazing supporters for all the work they did on our behalf over the past few weeks.  We beat over 500,000 charities to win Round 1, so we are particularly honored by this grant.   Special thanks to our amazing college interns at Michigan, Northwestern, and NYU, as well as to everybody who voted for us on Facebook, passed along the information to their friends, and posted about The Generation Project on their profile.

 

Next up: the 100 Round 1 winners compete for up to $1 million in Round 2.  Same rules apply--Facebook voting, etc, but none of our votes carry over.  

 

We'll have more posts about Round 2, our strategy, and what we would do with the $1 million grant in the coming days.  Until then, though, please accept our most heartfelt thanks on behalf of The Generation Project and the students that we serve.