New Mexico’s Leaders

We empower the local champions in all 33 counties of New Mexico. These local champions are ensuring access to the 10 vital services to ensure trauma-free and thriving residents.

Our Institute builds relationships with leadership on the state, county, city and community levels to keep on mission and accomplish six interrelated work goals.

Our Institute’s centerpiece initiative is the county-based 100% New Mexico program, designed to empower local champions as they increase access to the ten vital services for surviving and thriving.

The Institute staff and local initiative leadership collaborate to create a common system for collecting data on local challenges, serve as the data management hub, provide data analysis tools and provide dashboards to track data with the goal of turning data into action.

Institute staff liaison with public officials and stakeholders, educate community members through op-eds, articles and 100% New Mexico updates and track the pulse of national policies. We maintain ongoing dialogue with state department management teams and state lawmakers. We provide tools for local champions to increase dialogue with county commissioners, city mayors and council members, school board members, non-governmental organization managers, higher education leadership and chamber of commerce membership.

We serve as a repository for national research and best practices; we identify and advocate for use of effective state programs; we collect local and national innovations related to addressing health disparities and increasing access to vital services; we implement pilots of innovative strategies with select 100% New Mexico counties.

In order to reach our 100% New Mexico initiatives across the state, we are creating a system to allow all 100% New Mexico initiative participants to communicate online; we’re supporting virtual forums and symposiums hosted by both Institute state and local champions. We use the network to highlight all our resources, research and innovative strategies; we host regular online progress updates between initiative leaders to share challenges, workarounds and successes.

Institute staff develop blended learning approaches, providing onsite and online instruction, coaching and open lab events. We offer a series of community courses on data collection and management, assessment, planning, project implementation, evaluation as well as the frameworks guiding our initiatives: continuous quality improvement, collective impact and adaptive leadership. We also provide learning experiences focused on best practice and innovations focused on strengthening our ten ”surviving” and “thriving” service sectors.

The Anna, Age Eight Institute’s process of community empowerment is detailed in the book 100% Community: Ensuring Ten Vital Services for Surviving and Thriving by Katherine Ortega Courtney, PhD and Dominic Cappello. The authors, who serve as the Institute’s co-directors, welcome you to a statewide conversation.

Our mission is to ensure that all communities in New Mexico have the knowledge and resources they need to address childhood trauma and social adversity, which will lead to improved wellbeing of all children, families, students and workforces.

The hypothesis guiding the Anna, Age Eight Institute and our 100% New Mexico initiative is that if we ensure all our families have access to ten vital services, parents will have the support to raise their children in homes free of abuse, neglect, substance misuse, domestic violence and untreated mental health challenges. Five services for “surviving” include stable housing, secure food, behavioral heath care, medical care and transportation to services. Five services for “thriving” include: parent supports, early childhood learning programs, fully-resourced community schools, youth mentors and job training.

Our vision is that all children in New Mexico are thriving, leading healthy, happy and safe lives. We envision children, youth, parents and caregiving grandparents living in communities that are nurturing, safe and healing.