Harvard Awards $10,000 Fellowships to Four Education Ventures

By Daniel Okafor

The Harvard Graduate School of Education has named four Education Entrepreneurship Summer Fellows for 2026, each receiving a $10,000 grant to work full-time on a venture during the summer months.

The program launched in 2013. It funds current master's and doctoral students at HGSE, plus alumni with graduation dates of November 2025 or May 2026. The goal is simple: give founders money and time, so they can push a venture forward without a summer job competing for attention.

How the selection worked

Each applicant submitted a reflection on their entrepreneurial work and how a grant would advance it. A committee of HGSE faculty and administrators then scored the entries on four criteria:

• demonstrated interest and commitment to education entrepreneurship;
• venture viability and identified success measures;
• potential impact;
• progress proving the summer months would advance the venture's mission.

The four winners span two continents and one shared bet: that cheaper tools, not more staff, are the fastest way to widen access to good education.

Who won and what they are building

Krista Galleberg and Nanvi Jhala, Ed.M.'25 — Emergent Inquiry Studio. Galleberg is a Ph.D. student. Their venture, Emergent Inquiry Studio (EIS), brings affordable, project-based learning into early childhood classrooms in India, serving children ages 2 to 8. The mechanism is the cost line: EIS builds structured "learning ecosystems" from recycled materials, letting children develop creativity, collaboration and problem-solving skills through hands-on exploration. The founders pitch it as a scalable way to bring high-quality learning into underserved schools.

Livia Fares, Ed.M.'26 — Opta. Opta is an AI-powered career development platform for underserved Brazilian university students entering the workforce. It attacks a specific bottleneck: biased hiring filters. Opta replaces them with a competency-based pipeline built on a four-step process — a self-assessment, career matching, opportunity mapping and an evaluation of overall job readiness. Fares frames the outcome as improved social mobility.

Daril Ndodjang, Ed.M.'26 — Village Labs. Village Labs runs AI-powered simulations that let educational organizations test programs and policies before implementing them. Grounded in emerging research on AI agent simulations, the platform models how different groups will react to proposed changes and flags potential conflicts and failure points early. The economics are the selling point: anticipating human dynamics reduces costly implementation failures and improves program design.

Purva Parwani, Ed.M.'26 — Young Founders Lab. Young Founders Lab is a school-based entrepreneurship program for secondary students in underserved communities. Students identify local challenges, conduct research and build ventures with mentorship support, ending in student-led projects and presentations. Parwani aims to create a scalable model for embedding entrepreneurial thinking in low-income education systems. The program plans to pilot across multiple schools in India.

What the cohort signals

Three of the four ventures sit outside the United States — two in India, one in Brazil — and two lean on AI as the core engine rather than a bolt-on feature. The program itself, running since 2013, has consistently used small grants to test whether early-stage education ventures can survive contact with real classrooms before larger funders step in. For this cohort, the summer grant of $10,000 per venture is the next data point on whether each model can convert pilot-stage promise into measurable impact.