Strategic Plan
A Look Forward
Over the past 25 years, the Thornburg Foundation has granted more than $50 million to nonprofits with a focus to New Mexico. During that time, we’ve worked to become a model for how family foundations can support advocacy organizations that advance smart, non-partisan evidence to create systemic change that improves the lives of people in our community.
In response to feedback from our partners, community stakeholders and our own learnings over the years, we developed a new Strategic Plan and updated our vision, mission, and values. We believe this new plan better reflects our central focus of advancing systemic changes in our community, while promoting equity and transparency.
Vision: The Thornburg Foundation advances systemic change that serves the public.
Mission: The Thornburg Foundation uses an evidence-based strategic approach to solve systemic problems that impact people and communities.
Values: 1) Trust evidence, 2) Collaborate, 3) Work strategically, 4) Strive for excellence, 5) Adapt, 6) Model transparency and accountability, 7) Promote equity, and 8) Do the right thing.
Strategic Plan Focus Areas
Build the Foundation’s Capacity to Achieve Results
We are investing in our team, engaging the community to inform strategic initiatives, and expanding public knowledge of our work. As part of this effort, we are establishing several advisory boards, starting with the Education, Water, and Land & Agriculture initiatives, which may expand to advisory boards for all strategic initiatives.
Leverage Funding for Strategic Initiatives
We have an invaluable opportunity to leverage public and private funding for the Foundation’s strategic initiatives by coordinating with other funders, ensuring long-term sustainability of our funder groups, funding capacity building for our grantees to pursue federal grants, and recruiting national foundations to New Mexico.
Spread Our Model of Advocacy to Advance Systems Change
We have nearly 10 years of experience in funding advocacy organizations to advance systems change. Moving forward, we’ll be putting more effort into spreading our model to other family foundations by sharing our approach at philanthropic forums.
Develop a Monitoring and Evaluation Framework
We aim to maximize the impact of our strategies and policies by developing a rigorous monitoring and evaluation system and ensuring that every strategic initiative has a rigorous evaluation conducted.
Strengthen the Capacity of the Nonprofit Sector in Pursuing Federal Funds
Our goal is to strengthen the nonprofit sector’s capacity to pursue and secure public funding by developing a landscape analysis for current grant assistance, establishing a new strategic initiative for grant assistance, developing our grant assistance model to support nonprofits pursuing federal funds in partnership with philanthropy-serving associations, and support trainings in partnership with philanthropy serving associations to expand national nonprofit access to federal funds.