Giving Compass' Take:

• EducationSuperHighway is a nonprofit that reached its goal of connecting 99 percent of K-12 students to high-speed broadband internet and is now preparing to sunset. 

• How is this an example of nonprofit success? What are the significant components of its model that allowed this nonprofit to achieve its goals?

• Read about how to sunset a foundation. 

It’s the beginning of the end of the road for EducationSuperHighway.

After seven years of coordinated efforts to improve internet access in schools, thereby laying the foundation for digital learning to take root and expand in U.S. classrooms, the nonprofit is preparing to shut down.

But it’s a move both the industry and founder and CEO Evan Marwell are celebrating. The closure does not come on the heels of financial woes, a leadership scandal or legal dispute. Instead, EducationSuperHighway is sunsetting because, well, that’s what Marwell always intended it to do—once the organization reached its expressed goal of connecting 99 percent of K-12 students to high-speed broadband.

“When I started the organization, I really did view this as a finite goal,” Marwell tells EdSurge. “We’re almost to the end.”

By next fall, the mission will be accomplished, Marwell says, at which time he will step away from his role, close down EducationSuperHighway and pass on its assets to a yet-to-be-determined national partner organization.

Marwell himself didn’t know much about the problem until, after a conversation with his daughter about the prohibitively slow internet at her private K-8 school, he decided to start a nonprofit to address it.

For Marwell, a serial entrepreneur, EducationSuperHighway presented a new and refreshing challenge. He’d spent his career building and selling companies in various industries, including finance, telecommunications, software and consumer retail. He wanted something different, something meaningful. So seven years ago, knowing little about school broadband, he dove in.

Read the full article about nonprofit providing broadband internet access by Emily Tate at EdSurge.