On September 11, the Instituto del Puente at Future Focused Education will be heading to Las Cruces to talk to folks from Las Cruces Public Schools, Ngage New Mexico, and other partners about work-based learning opportunities in Doña Ana County. We want to learn from them and build with them to create more opportunities for young people all across the state. 

We have spent a lot of time in Las Cruces over the past few years and we are more impressed with the community's commitment to young people each time we visit. We are especially impressed with the work that Las Cruces Public Schools have done and the willingness they've shown to collaborate. It’s a collective understanding that the way forward involves inviting many people to the table to help create and execute an agenda that is focused on equity. As we say at Future Focused Education, the goal is to provide “the best education for the students who need it the most.”  

Doña Ana County is the second largest county in New Mexico, with a population of more than 220,000. According to data from the Center for Community Analysis, about half of the population speaks a language other than English; their median income is $44k, and 80% have a high school diploma. The county is more contained geographically and arguably more unified than Bernalillo. People in Doña Ana often feel ignored because they are not in the power bases of Albuquerque or Santa Fe, but this also means that they come together more readily. According to Lori Martinez and Marisa DeWolf with Ngage, New Mexico, this mindset has led to unique opportunities for partnership across the borders and within the county - there is more reliance on each other and more reason to collaborate.

Lori Martinez, Executive Director of Ngage, describes Doña Ana as “big enough to have a fair amount of resources, but still small enough to have that community mentality, where there's two degrees of separation between a lot of people.” 

Ngage New Mexico is a nonprofit that focuses on improving child well-being in Doña Ana County through education. Ngage applies a collective impact framework and is a “backbone partner” for the Success Partnership, a coalition of school districts, nonprofits, parents, and community members. While Ngage is most known for its Early Childhood Education (ECE) work, they recently launched the Kinder to Career Coalition. 

The Kinder To Career Coalition was formed to connect early childhood, K-12, post-secondary, and workforce sectors that are working toward common goals.

Marisa DeWolf, Ngage’s Kinder to Career Coalition Coordinator, says that their two main focuses right now both have to do with work-based learning. 

“We do know that we have CTE programming and internship opportunities for students in all three districts, but we also know that it's a really small percentage of students,” says DeWolf. So they are working to expand access. For the folks at Ngage and the Success Partnership members, it’s about education as promoting well-being and lifelong learning. 

Lori Martinez empathizes with disengaged youth. “Our youth are screaming relevance at us in a million different ways,” she says. “They’re asking: ‘Why am I at school? What is this leading towards? Are people listening to me? Do they care about me? What am I going to use this for? Is school even built for someone like me?’” When it feels like education is only for the privileged few, the rest disengage. 

 “You can't treat career and technical education or work-based learning like a side note,” says Martinez. “We need to fully resource it and integrate it into the way we do education.” 

She is quick to point out, however, that districts have been trying to build what works for their community without sufficient resources. Whether it's staffing or funds for transportation, they're doing the best they can with the resources they have. But they need more, some of which can come from the Success Partnership.

Their other main focus of the Kinder to Career Coalition right now is having youth as partners, says DeWolf. 

“You know, it sounds really nice to have a youth advisory board, but how do we avoid being transactional? It’s great to say, ‘ let's talk to students about what they want,’ but then what do you do with that data?” says DeWolf.

Future Focused has been collaborating  with Ngage to ensure that work-based learning experiences are centered on youth - making sure that they align with what youth are interested in and making sure they are being paid. Both DeWolf and Martinez bring up the importance of centering students and their learning because young people know when they are not valued. In fact, Martinez argues that the difference between a student who's engaged and one who is not comes down to whether they feel cared for or not.

“This is about investing in our kids and treating them as  students and human beings who are learning and growing and not using them as resource and labor,” Martinez says.

The work of the Kinder to Career Coalition involves coordinating with employers, school administrators, students, and community members to try to establish new career pathways or work-based learning opportunities. For example, they are talking with partners about an existing electrician pre-apprenticeship program that right now is only being offered to people over 18. They want to adjust it so that students can start working toward the required 8,000 hours it takes to become a journeyman electrician while still in high school, through a dual credit program. Ideally, this helps employers and students at the same time. 

In all of their work, the Success Partnership is centered around collaboration and community. 

“I think that our biggest asset is really the mindset that we have in this Borderlands area,” says Marisa DeWolf. “It's unique to any other place that I've ever lived. And there's this real movement of people saying, when we collaborate, we really do work better.” 

In fact, CCA has put together a “Depths of Relationship” survey to better understand just how many partners are connected through Ngage’s ECE coalition work. They tracked “partnerships,” which were defined by having at least one collaboration with another organization. The results show that between 2013 and 2024, the number of ECE partnerships increased by 224% and the number of collaborations increased by 440%. 

So often, nonprofit organizations struggle to come up with metrics to measure their success because, even when positive data comes in, it’s hard to prove that it comes from any one particular organization or policy. Measuring success through how many relationships they’ve formed has proven to be a more useful metric because a key job of organizations like Ngage - and Future Focused Education - is to connect and convene, to foster collaboration among groups fighting for the same cause. And that is exactly what the Depths of Relationship data shows - that Ngage has increased their partnerships in the county and in the state every year since they began.

It's a confluence of events that makes Ngage the right partner to move a new agenda in the district. Deep relationships in the community, regard for the voice of young people, and a policy framework in the new graduation requirements that is waiting to be realized.

“It's my hope that with the new high school graduation standards that were passed, and with all this momentum going into career and technical education and work-based learning, that we really can work towards building more functional systems,” says Martinez.

This type of collaboration is something counties and districts across the state and across the country could learn from. It’s the same lesson we’re learning from our Innovation Zone schools: when we engage communities, school boards, nonprofits, and youth - especially youth - we improve education and overall community health.