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.

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 Fundis designed to reassert the role that public education plays in our country’s diverse and changing democracy, which requires supporting and strengthening young people’s sense of belonging, purpose, and agency.  The Youth Thriving Through Learning Fund  promotes the enabling conditions for more California adolescents to be prepared for and actively pursuing their goals for college, career, and civic life, in part by leveraging unprecedented state investments in public education and related systems.

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Purpose of Education Fund

This collaborative grantmaking initiative supports and strengthens young people’s sense of belonging, purpose, and agency within our democracy. Through the Purpose of Education Fund, we seek to reassert the role that public education plays in our country’s diverse and changing democracy, making California a national example of schooling that enlivens civic engagement.

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Youth Thriving Through Learning Fund

This collaborative grantmaking initiative fosters innovation and reimagines the learning experience for California’s diverse majority of youth while building on unprecedented state investments in public education and related systems.  With the Youth Thriving Through Learning Fund, we seek to create the enabling conditions for more California adolescents to be prepared for and actively pursuing their goals for college, career, and civic life.

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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.

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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 pursing the right goals and measures of success. 

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