By Tim Bedeaux, K-12 Education Policy Officer
The New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions handed out its first-ever “Future Ready Leader” Innovation Award this May. The award didn’t go to a single organization, but rather to the collective work of 21 philanthropic, corporate, and state partners collaborating to expand access to meaningful student experiences in northern New Mexico. The Thornburg Foundation is a proud supporter of the Northern New Mexico Pathways to Opportunity Strategy Table, which received recognition for the launch of the Northern New Mexico Youth Fund. The Youth Fund offers an exemplary model for what “meaningful student experiences” can look like when an idea moves off the page and directly into communities.
Launched in 2025, the Youth Fund pools resources from 21 philanthropic, corporate, and state partners to build work-based learning and career training pathways for “opportunity youth”— young people ages 16-24 who are disconnected from both school and the workforce. The LANL Foundation serves as a backbone organization, running meetings, coordinating partners, and handling grant administration, allowing funders to focus on the design of the fund.
One of the Youth Fund’s most innovative design principles is a collaborative decision-making model that centers youth voice. In 2025, a Regional Youth Advisory Council (RYAC) made up of engaged young people from northern New Mexico worked alongside Strategy Table members to distribute $1.85 million in grants to 19 community-based organizations, tribal communities, and school districts across the region — serving more than 800 young people by June 2026. Year 2 fundraising has already cleared $3.2 million.
The Thornburg Foundation’s education strategy treats “meaningful student experiences” as one of two pillars in its theory of change, alongside the development of a thriving educator ecosystem. The Foundation has long supported career-connected learning experiences, including systems that foster strong, evidence-based career and technical education. A systematic review from the American Institutes of Research demonstrates students who participate in career and technical education, work-based learning, and internships during high school are far more likely to graduate, often ready to join the workforce or continue on to college.
The Youth Fund is a strong model for regional collaboration, capable of connecting a community’s needs to the programs that deliver meaningful learning experiences for its students. Several elements contribute to its success:
- Relevant learning experiences. Work-based learning and career training connect a young person’s effort to something real: a job, a credential, or a next step.
- Youth voice as decision-making authority. The RYAC’s role in grant selection is a stronger version of “student voice” than most strategies attempt. Rather than a perfunctory survey asking youth what they want, the RYAC has real authority in the grantmaking process.
- Capacity-building for grantees. Youth Fund grants come with technical assistance from United Way of Northern New Mexico, such as training in data collection, analysis, and storytelling to help synthesize grantees’ impact and build funder confidence that the investment is working.
- Rural and tribal reach. The Youth Fund’s footprint extends meaningful-experience work into geographies that are hardest to serve, including rural and tribal communities that are often underfunded.
- A funding model built for scale. Twenty-one partners pooling capital, with Year 2 fundraising already outpacing Year 1, points toward the kind of coordinated regional funding ecosystem that turns a single grant into a sustained pathway.
The Thornburg Foundation’s support for the Northern New Mexico Youth Fund runs parallel to other efforts fostering meaningful student experiences. A recent grant to CommunityShare will help connect New Mexico schools with skilled community educators to co-design project-based learning experiences that reflect the communities in which students reside. Another grant to the Santa Fe School for the Arts and Sciences will begin to build public schools’ capacity to offer “expeditionary learning,” an instructional model centered on delivering core content standards through deep, semester-long explorations of topics relevant to students.
The Youth Fund’s future looks bright as it enters Year 2 of its three-year pilot. For the Strategy Table, the work continues as members grow the pooled investment fund and continue outreach to new philanthropic and corporate funders. In time, the Thornburg Foundation is confident that the lessons learned from this pilot will help drive deeper systems change, becoming a permanent fixture of New Mexico’s support for meaningful student experiences statewide.