For Immediate Release
June 20, 2025

Arlington, Va.—The Close Up Foundation is proud to announce that it is the recipient of an Edward E. Ford Foundation Educational Leadership Grant of $100,000 to help develop and pilot the Close Up Civil Discourse Credential. The grant will be matched on a 1:1 basis by Close Up through funds raised by charitable giving or earned revenue. 

The Close Up Civil Discourse Credential is a new initiative aimed at equipping high school students with essential civic skills such as analytical thinking, media literacy, and the ability to productively engage with multiple perspectives.  

Developed in partnership with Mastery Transcript Consortium, an ETS company, the credential holistically measures students’ mastery of three domains: Digital Citizenship, Communication Across Difference, and Analyzing Political and Social Issues. Within each domain are competencies, supporting curriculum, rubrics that outline learner progressions (moving from emerging to mastery), and assessments to guide development as students build mastery.    

“We see that these skills are in high demand nationwide: in classrooms, in college admissions, on university campuses, in the modern workplace, in politics and government, even in our everyday lives and decision-making processes,” said Close Up CEO Eric Adydan.   

The grant will go toward piloting, refining, and gathering feedback on the credential beginning this summer. A pilot cohort of schools will send educators to a Close Up-led professional development training in Washington, D.C., from July 30-31, 2025, following the Civil Discourse Lab for Educators. The pilot cohort of teachers will learn how to introduce the credential to students in a classroom setting, focusing on a range of communication and analytical skills and civic competencies to develop citizens capable of active participation in a complex democracy.    

Following the training, the pilot cohort will begin classroom implementation of the credential in the 2025-26 school year. Close Up will provide each pilot school with a stipend to support teachers as well as facilitate monthly learning sessions to give teachers guidance, new skills and strategies, and a recurring forum for sharing ideas and feedback. The pilot cohort will gain the tools and experience to train their colleagues, helping to create a scalable model for implementing the credential nationwide through ongoing webinars and in-person trainings.  

“We are confident in the success of this approach because we have witnessed a growing desire nationwide for authentic performance assessments for students as opposed to exclusive reliance on the classic grade point average,” said Adydan. 

About the Close Up Foundation 

 Close Up is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, civic education organization that informs, inspires, and empowers young people to become active citizens. Since 1971, we have partnered with school districts nationwide to serve more than one million students and educators through experiential learning programs in our nation’s capital and in local communities, professional development, and curriculum design and consulting. Our goal is to connect what students learn in class to the real world around them and help them articulate their own views, listen to those of others, and engage with people of different backgrounds with tolerance and understanding. Learn more at closeup.org.