The mission of the newly constituted DC Education Compact (DCEC) is to promote civic engagement, investment, and collaboration to improve student achievement in the District of Columbia. DCEC came into existence formally in January of 2006 as a result of a merger between the initiative known as the DC Education Compact and the Public Education Partnership Fund (PEP Fund). The PEP Fund opened for business in June of 2003 as a pooler of resources, which would then make large, systemic investments in the improvement of the DC Public Schools (DCPS). DCEC was established as an initiative, designed initially to convene and align the community around a consensus agenda in support of public education, in general, and the DCPS, in particular. Both organizations increasingly realized over the course of 2005 that they could better benefit DCPS and their own interests by merging the grantmaking capacity of PEP with the convening and planning capacity of DCEC. In November 2005, the organizations voted to formally merge under one board.