Fall AGOC Partners

Black Health New Mexico (Serves Bernalillo, Rio Arriba, and Santa Fe Counties) (2021)
The work of Black Health New Mexico (BHNM) is focused on a community-centered model that encourages community-defined interventions to public health problems, specifically health outcomes that disproportionately impact Black infants, mothers and families. Their mission is to provide community education and coalition building that increases community participation and leadership in health policy and programming. BHNM believes that interventions that seek to improve health outcomes, must be deeply rooted in and influenced by the expertise, leadership and lived experience of the communities most impacted. BHNM co-leads the Black and Indigenous Maternal Health Policy Organization and uplifts young Black women in their work through earned-credit or paid internships, centering their voices in the work, training them how to think more broadly about health disparities by centering the lived experiences of community members, engaging young people with their elder constituency and grounding them in a framework of care and healing.

Casa de Salud (Serves Bernalillo, Sandoval, and Valencia Counties) (2019-2023)
Casa de Salud (Casa) is a unique, non-profit health center in the Albuquerque South Valley that responds to critical needs for affordable primary care, addictions care, and LGBTQ and transgender care services for patients from low-wealth communities of the South Valley, International District and central NM. The Casa Health Apprentice Program is a successful, 10-year-old workforce development pathway in NM for primarily young women of color, typically from low and moderate income and immigrant families, who aspire to healthcare professions. The program provides hands on medical training and professional development. Apprentices shadow and train with Senior Apprentices and staff in a supportive learning environment, until they are able to perform clinic duties. Within a year, the Health Apprentices have potential to be promoted to Senior Health Apprentices. In this position they are given further training, more responsibility, and the additional role of training new Health Apprentices. This program serves adolescent girls of color by supporting their leadership advancement within the clinic, which further reinforces their sense of belonging and elevates their self-esteem, while creating a safe and supportive working environment that models what gender equity looks like on an organizational level.

Empowerment Congress of Doña Ana County (Serves the Colonias and smaller urban cities in Doña Ana County; specifically La Union, Chamberino, San Miguel, Vado/Del Cerro, City of Anthony, City of Sunland Park) (2019-2023)
The Empowerment Congress of Doña Ana County (EC) is a community engagement initiative that works with low-income, marginalized rural colonia and urban communities. EC endeavors to support community leaders exercising their agency and taking ownership of their neighborhoods, communities and within institutions and governmental bodies. Funding supports a 4-part educational workshop series called Descoloniz-ARTE, with the purpose to empower youth through discussions about identity, history, and membership. A majority of young women of color are taken through a leadership curriculum and then called on to actively participate in the design and painting of a community mural. Descoloniz-ARTE is intended to serve as a vehicle to empower young people of color to support them as they step into their agency and power while making a contribution to community or school. There is a collaborative effort between local youth, local artists and a community organization to collectively design and create a large-scale, community mural. The project’s goal is to ground young people in their identities by fostering their community awareness, pride, agency, and other markers of a healthy self-awareness and self-esteem.

Indigenous Women Rising (Serves statewide) (2021)
Indigenous Women Rising (IWR) is committed to honoring Native & Indigenous People’s inherent right to equitable and culturally safe health options through accessible health education, resources and advocacy. IWR partners with high school interns to develop skills around event planning and execution, data processing, and fundraising through storytelling. They also do media training with young people to support them in telling their own stories. IWR is intentional about incorporating the experiences and feedback of trans and non-binary community members in their work to provide accessible and safe reproductive and health education, resources and advocacy to Native and Indigenous Peoples.

La Semilla Food Center (Serves Doña Ana County, specifically the Paso del Norte region including Colonias communities) (2019-2023)
La Semilla Food Center’s mission is to foster a healthy, self-reliant, sustainable and localized food system in the Paso del Norte region of southern New Mexico. You Grow Chica! is summer day camp where adolescent girls of color learn from inspiring local women and discover that cultivating a relationship with healthy food and traditional food practices can lead to careers in science, history, health, nutrition, culinary arts, and agriculture. The program addresses gender justice and healing through the medium of food and food systems and engages adolescent girls from predominantly Latinx communities, including colonia communities, in food justice, personal, community, and environmental health, farm-based agroecological and ancestral foodways, and microenterprise development programming. Programming is rooted in and elevates the Mesoamerican cultural heritage and ancestral roots in the area, and grounds healing in their desert lands, foods, and medicines. Girls in the program evolve their perception of their choices and opportunities and begin to create their paths toward self-sufficient, healthy, and empowered lives.

Mother Tongue Project (Serves Santa Fe County) (2019-2022)
Mother Tongue Project (MTP) creates relevant, relationship-based, academic literacy programming for young mothers, whose education carries multi-generational benefits for adolescent girls of color and their families. MTP combines academic study, independent reading and mentorships to build literacy skills, investing at a critical point in young women facing persistent race and gender inequities and barriers to success. The juncture of parenthood and high school is a critical influence point for promoting the power of literacy in healing and achievement; encouraging students to tell their own stories; raising awareness; and building young women’s competence and confidence to engage in education, community and advocacy. The name of the program reflects the commitment to teen mothers’ voices. A young mom learning to read widely, think deeply and write and speak with purpose pushes beyond narratives of victimhood and stories others tell about her. By finding power in her voice, she claims more agency in her life.

New Mexico Black Central Organizing Committee (Serves Bernalillo County) (2021-2023)
The New Mexico Black Central Organizing Committee (NMBCOC) is a strategy and policy lab centering the lived experience of Black New Mexicans through building community power, advocacy, education and outreach.  Their work is built on joyful collaboration, coalition, and community building. The Committee began as a group of mostly Black women, Black youth and people of color who organized to encourage and support passage of ordinances and laws that would ban hair discrimination in New Mexico. These laws center the experience of Black women and girls and target the discrimination they face in schools, employment, public accommodations, and other spaces based on their hair texture and/or protective hair styles. The anti-hair discrimination laws passed in New Mexico in March 2021. NMBOCC plans to educate leadership in schools about New Mexico’s anti-hair discrimination laws; uplift adolescent girls of color by holding events that celebrate their experiences and identities; and hold listening sessions in central, southern, and northern New Mexico with Black adolescent girls to learn about their experiences to issue a report on the status of Black women and girls in New Mexico.

The Counseling Center (Serves Lincoln and Otero Counties, and Mescalero Apache Reservation) (2019-2023)
The Counseling Center provides an array of quality behavioral, social and supportive services to families and youth in need of assistance dealing with life challenges. The Center will provide a virtual eight-week Girls Circle aimed to counteract social and interpersonal forces that impede girls’ growth and development by promoting an emotional safe setting and structure within which Mescalero Apache girls can develop caring relationships and use their authentic voices.

During these COVID times the Counseling Center will also provide individual free virtual tutoring to adolescent girls of color in Otero County, who are struggling academically during this difficult time. They will also provide them with Coping thru Art and Journaling bags. The combination of art and writing can improve overall well-being and can contribute to lowering anxiety, stress, improving self-awareness and self-esteem, and allows another means of communicating ideas. Additionally, they will be distributing personal care and hygiene items for adolescent girls on a as needed basis.

Spring AGOC Partners

Anti-Racist Youth Leadership Institute (Bernalillo, Sandoval, and Valencia Counties) (2019-2023)
The Anti-Racist Youth Leadership Institute (AYLI) convenes a collective of youth-serving organizations to build anti-racist organizing skills with young people, while fostering wellness, networking, and relationship building between multiple generations of anti-racist organizers in Albuquerque. AYLI uses an intersectional approach to leadership development and social transformation. Their curriculum and programming accounts for the compounding effects of multiple identities, including gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. While the majority of AYLI’s participants self-identify as young women of color, they serve youth across the gender spectrum, and believe it is essential to work with a diverse group of young people in order to build relationships across differences, and develop a stronger coalition.

Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women (CSVANW) (Serves Bernalillo, Sandoval, Cibola, Valencia, Santa Fe, McKinley, San Juan, Taos, Rio Arriba, Otero, Lincoln Counties; All NM tribes, nations, and pueblos) (2022)
Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women has a mission is to stop violence against Native women and children by advocating for social change in our communities. Their project will serve Indigenous girls, young women, and their families who are experiencing the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). CSVANW will develop practices that strengthen, grow power and leadership for women and girls within the project scope. They will do this through the cultivation of community leadership, and by honoring the sacred stories and experiences of survivors. This project will uplift the stories of the women and girls who have been ignored and forgotten by media, law enforcement and the non-Indigenous communities of our region. These stories will defy the disparate treatment of our women and girls by the media, community and law enforcement.

Earthseed Black Arts Alliance (Serves Santa Fe County) (2021-2023)
Earthseed Black Arts Alliance focuses on centering and amplifying Black voices in Northern New Mexico as well as collaborating with Indigenous artists, artists of color and the city’s artist community as a whole. Earthseed held a “Sista Circle” summer camp in 2021 to provide a safe space for Black and mixed girls in Santa Fe County to build self-esteem, community, and cultivate inclusivity throughout a two-week long summer session. Sista Circle invited young girls to explore and express their Blackness with a group of women who shared their unique lived experience through critical conversations, creative expression, and mentorship.

Girls Inc. of Santa Fe (GISF) (Serves Santa Fe County) (2022)
Girls Inc. of Santa Fe inspires all girls to be strong, smart, and bold, through direct service and advocacy. (GISF) will implement a pilot program, Leadership Out Loud, at Capital High School to teach girls to use their voices to advocate for themselves on issues that are important to them. Many teens seek a platform from which to be heard and need resources to help them make that happen. This program will help the girls learn to assess critical problems affecting their lives and find solutions; collaborate with peers and adults to reach those solutions; and to develop the skills and knowledge they need to become change agents. They will have groups of girls in each grade at the high school develop and implement their advocacy projects through the 2022-2023 school year.

Indigenous Lifeways (Serves McKinley County, Navajo Nation and Zuni reservations) (2019-2023)
Indigenous Lifeways mission is to restore health and balance for all people and for our environment by utilizing traditional knowledge and wisdom, respect-filled land-based practices, ceremonies, and a deep understanding of the dynamics and peoples of our communities. Indigenous Lifeways currently supports a youth development project that aims to increase knowledge of environmental and health and social justice among indigenous girls and two-spirit people. They train and provide funding for  Social Justice Fellows to engage in a Literacy Sphere Curriculum, and to share information about environmental protection, uranium contamination and other social justice issues within their local chapters across the Navajo Nation. In order to document this work, and teach additional skills of filmmaking and podcast development to the Social Justice Fellows and other indigenous girls and two spirit community members, Indigenous Lifeways will conduct a series of quarterly trainings. Indigenous Lifeways will provide mentorship to the Social Justice Fellows as they develop podcast episodes and documentary shorts to highlight their environmental and social justice work across the Navajo Nation.

Littleglobe, Inc. (Serves Northern Santa Fe County, Rio Arriba County, Nambe Pueblo, Ohkay Owingeh, Santa Clara Pueblo, San Ildefonso Pueblo, Pojoaque Pueblo) (2019-2023)
Littleglobe is a New Mexico-based non-profit which consists of artists and facilitators committed to the practice of socially-engaged, participatory art that galvanizes individual and collective voices, activates empathy, and leads to personal and community agency. In collaboration with Tewa Women United’s A’Gin Youth Council and Tewa Roots Society’s Teen Coalition/Teen Council from Nambe Pueblo, Littleglobe will implement a storytelling and film-making research project. This youth-led program will allow the participants in both organizations the opportunity to learn media literacy, storytelling, media production and post-production in order to communicate stories about issues that affect themselves and their communities. Littleglobe will bring their expertise in storytelling, media production, and creative engagement to the group of young Native women, while providing opportunities for them to learn and develop both technical and social/emotional skills.

National Indian Youth Leadership Project (NIYLP) (Serves McKinley and Bernalillo Counties; Navajo, Zuni and other Pueblos) (2022)
National Indian Youth Leadership Project’s flagship program, Project Venture, is a culturally responsive, experiential outdoor adventure program geared to Indigenous youth grades 6 to 12. Project Venture utilizes a positive youth development approach that capitalizes on strengths rather than deficits. Project Venture has three components: experiential outdoor adventure activities; service learning; and peer mentoring/leadership. Experiential learning engages participants in outdoor adventure activities that develop critical thinking skills alongside physical abilities. Service learning engages youth in their communities, with a focus on activities to help address climate change. High school students train as peer mentors to support after-school and weekend activities. Funding will support incorporating two new components into Project Venture – Indigenous gardening activities and mindfulness techniques. Both components were developed in response to the negative impact of COVID-19 on the health and well-being of Indigenous youth. .

New Mexico Black Leadership Council (Serves Bernalillo County) (2019-2023)
The New Mexico Black Leadership Council (NMBLC) serves as a hub to create a viable and sustainable social profit sector designed to serve the Black communities in the state of New Mexico.  The NMBLC has a Roots Conservatory (RC) program that consists of a Roots Summer Leadership Academy (RSLA) and Roots Explorers Program (R.E.P.). The RC program provides year-round programming using arts and asset-based models of engagement to focus on building resilience, leadership, and self-esteem to youth of color ages 8-16 in Albuquerque’s International District. Each program includes a community-led Caregiver Council where caregivers and parents receive training, education and referrals for youth support.

NM Office of African American Affairs (NMOAAA) (Serves Bernalillo County and Statewide) (2019-2020)
Since 2016 the New Mexico Office of African American Affairs has curated and hosted the Inner Beauty…Total Me Summit for middle school girls of color. This gathering provides an entire day of interactive and informative trainings and workshops for young black and brown women, by black and brown women. The Summit is made up of several educational and empowering workshops, designed for young female students of color who identify as African American women, that provide a space to embrace themselves, achieve greater inner strength, healing (generational and self-healing), and support one another along their journey. The Inner Beauty Summit has grown from one summit to two summits a year to accommodate the interest in the Albuquerque Public Schools district wide. The goal of the Inner Beauty Summit is to equip young women with tools for better self-care, self-awareness, and self-advocacy, and provides young black and brown women tools to navigate their current lives and be agents of change in their family and community.