Strategic Priorities
Our resources and efforts are organized with one goal in mind: to advance thriving among California’s adolescents.
Isadora Kosofsky/CatchLight for Stuart Foundation
At the highest level, our strategy relies upon mutually reinforcing priorities: advancing thriving adolescents by creating equitable systems.
LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR STRATEGIC PRIORITIES
California Thriving Youth Initiative
The Foundation has initiated, with partners, two multi-year collaborative funds that leverage and integrate decades of connected work in California. These inter-related funds build on a $30 million investment by the Stuart Foundation and benefit from further investments by philanthropic partners. The Purpose of Education Fund centers the role of public education in preparing adolescents to participate in the country’s diverse democracy and seeks to make California a national example of how to support and enliven civic engagement for today’s adolescents. The Youth Thriving Through Learning Fund aims to transform California’s education systems, in part by leveraging unprecedented state investments, to provide adolescents with better learning experiences and the supports they need to thrive in high school and in the transition to postsecondary, career, and beyond.
Purpose of Education Fund
This collaborative grantmaking initiative focuses on creating the conditions for young people to be informed and engaged agents of change in their communities. The Purpose of Education Fund centers the role of public education in preparing adolescents to participate in the country’s diverse democracy and seeks to make California a national example of how to support and enliven civic engagement for today’s adolescents.
Youth Thriving Through Learning Fund
This collaborative grantmaking initiative aims to transform California’s education systems to provide adolescents with better learning experiences—the right conditions, climate, opportunities, and supports they need to thrive in high school and in the transition to postsecondary, career, and beyond. The Youth Thriving Through Learning Fund also seeks to target a moment of opportunity—an influx of state investments supporting secondary education—to ensure such investments yield long-term advances benefiting California’s youth and support the state’s workforce and economy.
Foster Youth and Other Priority Populations
The Foundation continues its long history of investing to improve the lives of young people furthest from opportunity by advancing policy and practices that improve educational outcomes for these youth. Integral to this work are young people who have been directly impacted and are identifying and implementing solutions.
Transforming Systems for Equity
The Foundation invests in systems-change efforts alongside grantees, partners, and systems thinkers and leaders. For adolescents to thrive, public education must be equity-focused and rooted in relationships of trust and respect to ensure well-resourced schools that are coherently pursuing the right goals and measures of success.