Strategic Partnerships: Powering the infrastructure for Texas’ future

Texas faces challenges that no single organization can solve alone. From workforce development and education access to housing affordability and environmental resilience, the scale and complexity of the issues shaping our state’s future demand more than good research — they demand collaboration. At Texas 2036, our strategic partnerships are central to how we do our work, amplify our impact, and ultimately deliver for Texans.

We recently completed a yearlong review of our last decade as an organization and how to prepare for the next 10 years as we approach our state’s 200-year birthday in 2036. This included looking at where we’ve been with our partnership work, where we are today, and where we’re headed — because this network of collaboration is as important to our mission as any report we publish.

Why Partnerships Matter

Our partnerships aren’t incidental. They are intentional investments in our ability to drive data-driven policy change at scale. When we evaluate any partnership opportunity, we ask three fundamental questions:

1. Does it increase our productivity and efficiency — advancing our priorities in ways we could not accomplish alone?
2. Does it strengthen our reputation and impact — building the credibility and force-multiplier effect that meaningful policy change requires?
3. And does it elevate our visibility — creating awareness, expanding our audience, and opening doors for long-term sustainability?

Texas 2036 has the big goal of improving lives and opportunities for all Texans. But like many organizations, we have finite capacity. Strategic partnerships allow us to pursue broad policy interests with additional access to data, expertise and audiences we simply couldn’t reach on our own.

What We’ve Built

Our partnership portfolio spans three categories — Research Organizations, Business and Industry Organizations, and Public-Interest Organizations.

Research partnerships have been particularly foundational. Our work with UT Dallas and the Education Research Center (ERC) has provided the data backbone for some of our most impactful reports, including research on higher education in Texas prisons, the Earned But Not Awarded report, and the Classroom to Career Financial Simulator tool. These are not just academic exercises — they are practical tools that inform real policy decisions. Our relationship with the Texas A&M University Office of the State Climatologist has similarly allowed us to keep our annual extreme weather analysis current and credible, at a cost-effective scale.

On the business and industry side, organizations like the Greater Houston Partnership, the Dallas Regional Chamber, and the Commit Partnership came together as lead partners in our AIM Hire Texas Coalition, one of our most visible efforts on education and workforce policy. Texas Realtors even helped fund one of our housing studies — a prime example of a partnership that also creates financial opportunity and shared ownership of outcomes.

For visibility and supporting our efforts to build civic demand throughout the state, our collaboration with the Texas Tribune and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas on a legislative session recap broadcast last year brought our policy analysis directly to a broad, engaged audience — the kind of reach that extends well beyond the legislative process and into the public conversation.

What We’re Building Next

The partnerships we will be looking to develop and leverage now represent our most ambitious thinking yet about what deliberate, long-term collaboration can achieve.

Texas universities house an extraordinary volume of expertise and data that represent a vast reservoir of information for policymakers. Our goal is to build a statewide policy research network that connects universities, policymakers, and shared data infrastructure to generate faster, more rigorous analysis on the issues shaping Texas’ future.

Our new Vice President of Data and Research Dr. Tracy Ayrhart is leading this effort to build a statewide research partnership network. We already collaborate with UT Austin’s LonestaRP3 and we are exploring a broader partnership that could engage up to five of UT San Antonio’s colleges and institutes — including their new College of AI, Cyber, and Computing; College of Health, Community and Policy; School of Data Science; and the Texas Demographic Center.

These discussions are centered on three questions:

1. How do we translate academic research into actionable policy outcomes?
2. How do we shape the next generation of public policy practitioners through curricula, internships, and fellowships?
3. Could this collaboration contribute to building shared data infrastructure that allows researchers and policymakers to work from a common set of reliable, accessible datasets?

That last point is worth underscoring. A statewide, publicly accessible data infrastructure — one that connects academic rigor with real-time policy relevance — would be transformational. It would allow researchers, policymakers, and the public to work from a shared evidence base and dramatically expand the scale and speed of policy analysis across the state.

We also have plans to pursue partnerships with TAMIU’s Center for Border and Economic and Enterprise Development to support future economic impact analysis, and UT El Paso’s Hunt Institute for Global Competitiveness to expand our capacity on trade-related research. Both institutions bring deep regional expertise and community ties that would deepen our understanding of some of the most dynamic and consequential parts of our state.

And nationally, our senior team recently traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with leadership from the Bipartisan Policy Center, the U.S. Chamber Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and other national organizations. We discussed areas of common interest and building the relationships that will keep Texas 2036 connected to the best thinking happening across the country.

The Road Ahead

What ties all of this together is a shift from partnerships of convenience to partnerships of intention and strategy. Many of our relationships developed organically; they were born of a specific data need, a shared issue priority, or a timely opportunity. That has served us well. But as we look to the future, we are working to create more deliberate structures: formal, long-term agreements with dedicated resources, aligned goals, and shared accountability.

The aspiration is clear, partnerships that don’t just support what we already do, but expand what’s possible. Partnerships that build civic demand for data-driven solutions. That increases our visibility and fuels our financial sustainability. That trains the next generation of policy leaders across Texas. And that ultimately makes Texas 2036 a more powerful force on behalf of, as our CEO has said, our sole client — the people of the great state of Texas.

We are proud of the network we’ve built, and we’re just getting started. If your organization is working on the challenges shaping Texas’ future, let’s talk!