New Mexico Military Institute Foundation

New Mexico Military Institute Foundation

The New Mexico Military Institute Foundation was established in 1945 as a nonprofit corporation to build and administer an endowment for the New Mexico Military Institute, a public military junior college and high school founded in 1891. Chaired by Kim D. Greaves, the foundation's mission is to provide scholarships, facility funding, and institutional support. Its asset base is unusual for an educational endowment, blending traditional pooled investments with direct real estate holdings, including ground leases on campus land and the Daniels Leadership Center in Roswell. The foundation's deployment strategy mixes fund investments managed by the New Mexico State Investment Council for certain scholarship programs with direct ownership of income-producing real assets. Confirmed portfolio holdings include the NMMI Campus Land, the Toles Learning Center, and a ground lease portfolio in Roswell. The foundation also stewards non-financial assets that carry cultural and reputational weight: the McBride Museum Collection, the Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth Hurd Collection, and Bataan Death March memorabilia. Operations are concentrated in New Mexico, with no disclosed investments outside the state. The foundation is stewarded by a board of trustees and a small professional staff led by President and CEO Deana Curnutt. It maintains no additional offices. Philanthropic structures are limited to the foundation itself. In 2024, the Daniels Fund committed a $500,000 grant for the IPA Capital Renovation Project, adding to the foundation's project-based capital pool. The organization also counts notable alumni among its stakeholders, including Hilton Hotels founder Conrad Hilton and NFL Hall of Famer Roger Staubach, though their direct engagement with the foundation is not publicly detailed. The foundation's structure departs from the pooled endowment model dominant in higher education. It operates as a direct real estate owner on and around a state-owned campus, with a beneficiary interest in New Mexico state trust lands managed by the State Land Office. That land-grant linkage, combined with project-specific donor grants rather than a unified investment pool, creates a capital structure more fragmented and real-asset-heavy than peers of comparable size.