California Thriving Youth Initiative

Collective support for the learning, leadership, and well-being of California’s adolescents. 

Isadora Kosofsky/CatchLight for Stuart Foundation

Meeting a moment in California and the United States that holds both immense promise and significant challenges for public education and the adolescents that schools serve and support.

In June 2024, the Foundation announced, with partners, two multi-year collaborative funds that comprise the California Thriving Youth Initiative, which leverages and integrates decades of related work in California. Housed at the California Community Foundation, the Initiative is seeded with a $30 million investment by the Stuart Foundation and benefits from further investments by a range of philanthropic partners.   

• The Purpose of Education Fund 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.
• The Youth Thriving Through Learning Fund 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.

The Stuart Foundation, the California Community Foundation, and other Fund partners share a commitment to advancing equitable public education systems that provide young people – particularly those furthest from opportunity – with the conditions, climate, opportunities, and supports they need to succeed and thrive.  The Funds are timed to leverage significant equity-focused investments in California and to respond to the increasingly polarized education debates in many communities by offering an informed, positive vision for our public education system. 

Activities carried out via the Funds include strategic grantmaking, convening partners, narrative and storytelling, and collective learning from innovations that can shape systems-level transformations. 

We invite additional aligned funding partners and donors to join this collective effort to support the learning, leadership, and well-being of adolescents in California and beyond.