Welcome to IGNITE!

IGNITE is a Seattle Schools program, created for Seattle Schools in November 1999. Funding is provided by federal Carl Perkins dollars, which is federal funding for Non-Traditional education for women and minorities. IGNITE now contributes to the funding of IGNITE as well.

The program has been running in all of the 12 Seattle High schools since 2000. We have expanded to middle schools, more each year. After winning the National Best Practice from the National ACTE, Association of Career and Technical Education organization, the Directors of the National ACTE, the National Women's law Center, and NAPE, National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity, in 2007, many other schools both nationally and internationally created IGNITE programs of their own, using the comprehensive toolkit created by the founder of IGNITE, Cathi Rodgveller M.S. Ed. Cathi has been a teacher and School Counselor for 30 years. She has taught every grade level, and doing IGNITE is her passion.

Seattle Schools now views IGNITE as a Premier program and best practice for educating young women about STEM careers. STEM ( Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) educators from anywhere, both nationally and internationally can contact the founder, Cathi Rodgveller, for information on how to start their own IGNITE group. Cathi has created a comprehensive toolkit on how to successfully run your own IGNITE program, which can be found on this website. The book will soon be offered on Amazon and we will announce when that is available.

Join us on June 10th, 2012, for the Second Annual Brighter Future Walk, a fundraiser for IGNITE! For more information, go to the Brighter Future Walk section of the website.

The IGNITE Toolkit is the manual you need for starting and managing the IGNITE program in your own schools, and it is now available for purchase online.

The IGNITE Toolkit was written by our founder Cathi Rodgveller to help you catch the IGNITE spirit and start an IGNITE chapter in your school or community. Ideally, it will provide all the informational resources necessary to ensure success from the first presentation on. Each section of the Toolkit contains information and step-by-step instructions in concise, readable "bytes."

With the toolkit in hand, you will have everything you need to work with us to get your own chapter up and running and start inspiring the girls you work with.

Please look around our site , and watch the IGNITE overview below to learn more about our work and how you can help:

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Our previously published newsletters are available online.

We welcome your donations, because educating young women to gain skills in these fields should be a priority in 2012. Federal funding is drastically being cut each year and we rely on donations to keep our program running.

Visit our bulletin board to post volunteer opportunities!