DesignPhiladlephia’s K-12 education program is now a certified Educational Improvement Organization in Pennsylvania, which means that your donation could be eligible for a 90% Educational Improvement Tax Credits (EITC) against your state tax liability. Due to Federal tax deductions that are also available to businesses, your combined tax benefits may actually exceed the value of your gift — all while you help us bring the discovery of design and the built environment to students across Philadelphia.

The way the EITC program works is that the organizations must be approved as "Educational Improvement Organizations" (i.e. the DesignPhiladelphia) AND the businesses that donate to the program must also be approved by the State to receive the tax credits. The approval process for businesses can be very competitive and hard to access, so the State created what they call "Special Purpose Entities" (SPE), which essentially allow businesses and individuals to give to the SPE and receive the tax credits without having to go through the approval process themselves.

We are partnering with Friends of Education, which is an approved Special Purpose Entity (SPE) with available tax credits for businesses that want to donate to the our program.

If you are a business partner or owner and are interested in redirecting your state tax dollars to the DesignPhiladelphia -- this is all it takes:

1. You would identify how much you can give based on your state tax liability.
2. You would contribute that amount to Friends of Education and join their SPE.
3. Friends of Education would transfer 100% of your donation to DesignPhiladelphia
4. Friends of Education would send you a K-1 to you to use when filing our tax returns offsetting your tax liability.
5. DesignPhiladelphia will acknowledge your gift as a supporter of the Architecture and Design Education Program.

Increase Our Impact

Our K-12 program is committed to exponentially expanding access to design education for students across Philadelphia. 

In the classroom, I’m fighting the students’ urge to not care – they have problems that are so much bigger. I have to make every class relevant, expanding their lens. I show them how their problems could be tied to their built environment and push them to ask: ‘How could I make it better?  —Candice Vanderhorst, MArch, Volunteer teacher

As we expand career horizons for students in largely underserved African American and Latinx communities, we are building a pipeline to design and construction careers for all. This lays the groundwork for greater diversity and justice in the professions.

Design education is a social escalator, a game changer. Architecture and design let kids say: “Yes I’m really good at that! Even if I don’t do well in standardized tests, I can think with my hands.”  —Andrew Phillips, PhD, Chair, School of Design, String Theory School

Please contact Rebecca Johnson at rebecca@designphiladelphia.org or Jermaine Jenkins at jermaine@designphiladelphia.org to discuss your interest in EITC. Or you can reach out directly to Jed Silversmith or Todd Unger at Friends of Education.