One Network

Start with the seats.

The compiled records document 169 board seats held by 150 people across 23 organizations — New Mexico’s chambers of commerce, civic nonprofits, education-advocacy groups, and a few public bodies. Most people appear exactly once.

Eleven people hold more than one seat. They are the network’s connective tissue — every line in this story runs through at least one of them.

Kara Bobroff holds six: One Generation, the Native American Community Academy and its charter network, a TNTP board seat, a state Public Education Department role, and a White House advisory appointment — a national education-reform axis.

Amanda Aragon runs NewMexicoKidsCAN and also sits at Excellent Schools New Mexico, the Hispano Chamber, and United Way of North Central NM — the single person who touches both the advocacy cluster and the business-civic cluster.

Janice Torrez, president of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of New Mexico, sits at United Way NCNM and both Albuquerque chambers.

And Gabriella Duran-Blakey — the superintendent of Albuquerque Public Schools — sits inside the same web: an ex-officio Hispano Chamber seat and a co-chair role in United Way NCNM’s Rising Together initiative. Remember that seat; it comes back at the end.

Now connect the boards.

Draw a line wherever two boards share a member and the 23 organizations resolve into one connected web — not a scatter of separate institutions.

The business-civic spine: the Greater Albuquerque Chamber and United Way of North Central NM share four board members; the Hispano Chamber shares three more with United Way. Three boards, one leadership pool.

The advocacy cluster: Excellent Schools NM and NewMexicoKidsCAN share members with each other and with a City Fund partner — and the cluster plugs into the chambers and United Way through the connectors you just met.

Money flows along the same lines.

The network’s documented funding, in one picture: national money on the left, the advocacy organizations in the middle, and where it goes on the right.

Money in: City Fund — the national charter-expansion fund seeded by Reed Hastings and John Arnold — granted $1.4M to Excellent Schools NM and $300K to the NMKidsCAN Action Fund. The Daniels Fund added $900K, Calder $100K; Kellogg, Hilton and Fidelity fund the Partnership for Community Action.

Money to elections: the NMKidsCAN Action Fund reported roughly $300K in independent expenditures supporting four candidates for the Albuquerque school board — Danielle Gonzales, David Ams, Courtney Jackson and Joshua Martinez. All four won seats.

Money to schools: ESNM re-grants to charter schools — $300K to Mission Achievement & Success, $200K to East Mountain, $81K to Thrive.

Then the public money starts moving.

Starting weeks after the new board was seated, vendors with ties to this network appear on the district’s ledger — $2.34M across four vendors since the fall of 2023. Each one arrived through a different procurement door. Every document cited below is linked, and every payment appears in the district’s published cash-disbursement registers.

Door one — a scored RFP. Payday Inc’s payroll-services contract (RFP 24-020RR) was approved Oct 25, 2023 — the evaluation scored it top of four bidders, and board member Courtney Jackson seconded the motion. A year later, on Oct 2, 2024, the board approved a higher amount: the district had won $1.3M in Innovation Zone grant funding for student-intern wages, all of it flowing through this contract. Payments to date: $1.46M. Two things are simultaneously true: most of it is pass-through wages for student interns — and the company’s president sits on the NewMexicoKidsCAN board, whose Action Fund had just spent to elect four board members.

Door two — losing the RFPs, getting paid anyway. When TNTP competes on score, it loses: 5th of 5 — 46.58 against the winner’s 94.00 — for the Refugee & Newcomer Support program (Jul 2024), and tied 3rd of 7 for Middle School Re-Design consulting (Nov 2024), which went to the top-ranked bidder. Its $439K flows instead through a door that opened earlier: RFP 23-091RR “Professional Development Services,” a 36-vendor multi-award approved Aug 23, 2023 — no minimum guaranteed, purchases “dependent on need, budget and funding.”

Door three — a sole source. In 2025 the district paid United Way of North Central NM $244K under sole-source 2024-002ss — an agreement the superintendent requested, for an initiative she helps lead at UWNCNM. The district’s own determination designates UWNCNM as the “exclusive coordinating entity.” The two $98,930 payments landed Apr 3 and Jun 19, 2025; seven more payments followed from December 2025 into May 2026, past the agreement’s stated term.

Door four — the multi-award. Sunny505, an Albuquerque marketing firm whose owner was a registered New Mexico lobbyist (2023–2025 registrations), has been an APS vendor since 2019. What happened after the October 2023 marketing award deserves its own chart.

One RFP, told twice.

Marketing RFP 24-013RR: ten firms scored by a three-member committee, and — instead of one winner — seven awarded at once (a “multi-award”), up to $1M a year in total. The evaluation sheet and action report are one click away — every score below is on them.

Sunny505 finished 7th of 10. Its 77.17 total includes 8.00 New Mexico–preference points (ringed) — scored on its own, 69.17 would have trailed every bidder but one. The preference points are lawful; they are also the entire reason the firm made the award list.

Then the money chose differently. Since the award: rank-1 BrandEra $135K, rank-2 Mariposa $116K, rank-3 Carroll $16K — and ranks 4, 5 and 6 never billed a dollar.

The most-paid firm of the seven is the one that needed preference points to qualify at all: Sunny505, $194K since the award — $85K of it in 2026, as higher-ranked firms tapered off. A multi-award creates discretion: every awardee is eligible, so which firm gets the work is decided afterward, purchase order by purchase order. The scores are public; the allocation isn’t scored. Check any firm’s payments yourself against the district’s posted registers.