Announcing 2022 Grants for New Mexico

Announcing 2022 Grants for New Mexico  

Santa Fe, New Mexico  

June 1, 2020 

The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation is proud to announce the outcomes of our 2022 grants cycle in New Mexico. This year, the Foundation has granted over $1,000,000 in the state, with an emphasis on building the capacity of innovative arts and education organizations that strive to improve rural learning, strengthen local communities, and create opportunities for college and career advancement. 

We’re delighted to be collaborating with other local funders to launch the Golden Apple Foundation in New Mexico, a proven model established in Illinois for teacher training, placement, mentoring, and retention. Golden Apple’s rigorous and equitable Scholars and Accelerators program will combat New Mexico’s severe teacher shortage with an emphasis on placing teachers in rural schools. (Want to join the effort? Their NM team and program are growing quickly—they’re hiring a Chief Program Officer and recruiting their first Golden Apple Scholars cohort.) 

The Thoma Foundation is also thrilled to be working with two outstanding organizations in the southern part of the state: the University Art Museum (UAM) at New Mexico State University and Ngage New Mexico. UAM is the only contemporary art museum in the state south of Albuquerque and has built its reputation through community-engaged curation and dynamic museum pedagogy. Our three-year grant will allow UAM to hire a Curator of Education and a teaching Preparator so that museum leadership can focus on strategic planning and sustained growth. Our grant to support Ngage NM comes directly out of the Thoma Foundation New Mexico Education Funders Southern Summit that we hosted in collaboration with Groundworks NM in November 2021 (read more about the outcomes of this work on our Grants Research page). Ngage functions as the backbone organization of the prenatal-to-career SUCCESS Partnership in Doña Ana County, a collective impact initiative that seeks to improve educational outcomes for local students. Though our grant places focus on rural parts of Doña Ana County, we are also excited to be supporting Ngage at this pivotal point in their growth as an exemplary organization doing high-quality community-embedded collective impact work. 

Here in Santa Fe, our grants staff is building new relationships and furthering existing partnerships. We met the team at MASS Design Group through their work with Moving Arts Española (a 2020 grantee) and are excited to be supporting the expansion of MASS’s Space & Society Fellowship Program to New Mexico as part of the Sustainable Native Communities Lab. The Foundation has also renewed the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s 2021 Digital Changemaker Grant, furthering the impressive work already accomplished to date in making O’Keeffe’s legacy more accessible online and in the museum, and setting a high bar for museum meta-data management. Finally, we are honored to be the lead funder for Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric now on view at SITE Santa Fe.  

For more complete descriptions of these projects, please visit our Previous Recipients page. Official press releases about these grants will be available soon.  

While we are not making further New Mexico grants this calendar year, our program staff is always excited to learn about upcoming work with an eye toward funding opportunities in 2023. With the exception of our Collections-Related Grants, all opportunities are by invitation only. Have questions about our grantmaking? Contact us at grants@thomafoundation.org. For media and press inquiries, please write communications@thomafoundation.org.