Santa Fe Hestia Fund isn’t about building an endowment or becoming a vast corporate entity.
Named after the Greek goddess of the hearth, its mission is simple: increase high school graduation rates by gathering and providing grants to organizations that support middle schoolers in the City Different. The group — one of just a few women’s giving circles in the state — has distributed more than $2.4 million since its inception.
“We’re just about gathering our money and giving it out,” said past chair and current member Christine McDermott. “And there’s just something so unique about that. It’s antiestablishment, and I love that.”
Nearing its 20th year — the Santa Fe fund was established in 2008 — Hestia Fund has given money to some Santa Fe nonprofits, like Communities in Schools of New Mexico, for more than a decade. With the recent development of a grassroots grant, the group has been focusing, too, on helping new organizations get off their feet.
“It’s hard to be a kid growing up in Santa Fe; it’s hard [growing] up in New Mexico; it’s really hard to be a middle schooler,” said Communities in Schools Director of Philanthropy Lauren Kenig. “All of those things combined are nearly impossible, but together, with Hestia’s support, we’re able to surround these kids with support.”
Free Flow New Mexico, a nonprofit started in 2020 that is dedicated to fighting barriers to menstrual products in the state, received its first-ever grant from Hestia Fund, program director Maggie Garone said.
“Hestia’s circle decided to believe in us before anyone else did,” Garone said. “That kind of trust is rare, and it plays a major part in Free Flow being able to work towards menstrual equity in our state.”
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Garone and Kenig’s remarks came at Hestia Fund’s annual grantee showcase last month, where more than a dozen nonprofit partners spoke about the giving circle’s impact on their work. In 2026, Hestia Fund gave nearly $200,000 to 26 local groups focused on health and human services, academics and arts and sports.
Grant applications for the 2027-28 school year opened Sept. 1 and will close Nov. 1. The grant review process, which involves member trips to each applicant’s home base, begins in December.
“The first time I went on a site visit, I was blown away, so to speak, because I didn’t know that there’s a lot of these smaller nonprofits,” said Hestia Fund Chair Marianne Dwight.
Hestia’s origins
Women’s giving circles operate differently depending on the group, but their models are largely similar. Women pool their financial contributions and collectively determine which organizations to fund.
Hestia Fund was founded by nonprofit alum Susan Priem in Boston in 2000. The original group of women agreed to each give $5,000 per year — which is still the requirement for a standard membership in the Santa Fe giving circle.
When Priem moved to Santa Fe in 2008, she established another Hestia Fund, which partners with the Santa Fe Community Foundation. Membership typically fluctuates between 20 and 45, McDermott said.
Susie Harburg, a retired pediatric nurse practitioner who was a Hestia Fund member in Boston and Santa Fe, said both iterations of the group were alike — but the Boston one focused on early childhood rather than middle school. Hestia Fund makes its grant-giving decisions based on a “whole child” framework, which emphasizes academic proficiency, out-of-school programs, social skills and community and essential needs, such as housing.
Birth to age 5 and middle school are two of the most critical age groups for youth, Harburg said.
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“If you don’t get a good start, it’s hard, and if you don’t get through middle school saying, ‘I’m going to graduate,’ then, you know, you drop out,” she said.
Santa Fe Public Schools saw a graduation rate of 80.2% in 2025, down almost 3% from the previous year. That’s slightly lower than the statewide average of 80.6% but higher than the rate in several other similarly sized districts, including Albuquerque.
“Kids drop out for all kinds of reasons,” Harburg said. “We don’t just work with academics.”
‘A prime population of volunteers’
Santa Fe has a unique community that attracts people who are passionate about giving, several Hestia Fund members said.
It also attracts nonprofits: There are roughly 1,700 in the city, according to the St. Vincent Hospital Foundation.
“I do think that the combination of people from the outside coming here and wanting to connect, wanting to settle, wanting to understand makes this a prime population of volunteers and of people who get engaged in a giving circle,” said membership committee chair Mathilde Sanson, who moved to Santa Fe with her wife — also a Hestia Fund member — after helping found a women’s giving circle in New York.
Sanson is also a member of 100 Women Who Care Santa Fe, another women’s giving circle that invites 100 or more women to donate $100 four times per year, then invites nominated and randomly selected local nonprofits to present on their work for a member vote on which they fund. The group has raised $930,154 to date and has a goal of reaching $1 million by the end of 2027 in line with its 15th anniversary.
“I think it’s just so exciting when you come to a meeting and you really feel the energy of the presentation of these nonprofits and why they need the funding,” said Katie Rountree, co-founder of 100 Women Who Care Santa Fe.
Most recently, the group gave $39,040 to Vital Spaces, a nonprofit aimed at finding and providing affordable art studios in Santa Fe.
“When I see the presentations and then I see what change has been made just by our donation to them, it just makes it all worthwhile,” Rountree said. “I always say to myself, ‘this is just too good of an idea to ever stop, ever.’”
Lily Alexander is a state accountability reporter for The New Mexican and Searchlight New Mexico, focusing on equity and transparency. Her position is part of the New Mexican Public Service Journalism Fund, and her stories are available to all readers without a paywall.
