Bema Consulting partners with government agencies, foundations, and nonprofits to design programs that work, evaluate whether they're working, and build the strategy to sustain what does.
Rigorous, right-sized evaluation designs that hold up to funders, legislators, and auditors alike.
Focused strategy for agencies and organizations that need to do fewer things, better, with evidence behind the choice.
Advisory support for foundations and funder collaboratives working to translate grantmaking into policy change.
Michael Weinberg, Ed.D.
Founder, Bema Consulting
Collaborative leader on policy change and legislative appropriations across healthcare, K-12 education, and early childhood systems — with experience ranging from classroom teaching to state budget-making.
Michael's path into evaluation and policy work started in the classroom — teaching elementary grades, then coaching literacy instruction, before moving into school leadership as a principal at a high-poverty PreK-8 school in New Mexico.
That on-the-ground experience shaped how he later approached public finance: as Program Evaluation Manager for the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee, where he used qualitative and quantitative methods to inform decisions across the state's multi-billion-dollar annual budget, and helped the evaluation unit earn national recognition for its body of work.
"He saw how funding decisions and system design could profoundly shape opportunities for children and families."
As Senior Policy Officer at the Thornburg Foundation, Michael helped lead a shift toward focused, long-term philanthropy in early childhood education, food and agriculture, and government reform — work later featured by Exponent Philanthropy as a case study in catalytic, policy-oriented grantmaking. He currently serves as Executive Director of Government Relations for New Mexico's largest private employer, shaping healthcare policy strategy across a nine-hospital integrated system.
Bema Consulting draws on this full arc — classroom to capitol to boardroom — to help clients make decisions that hold up under scrutiny and translate into real system change. Select engagements are conducted in partnership with fellow evaluator Catherine Dry.
New Mexico created New MexiCare to support informal caregivers of older adults who don't qualify for Medicaid-funded care but still need substantial help to remain safely at home — offering financial assistance, training, and care coordination statewide.
Bema Consulting led a two-year mixed-methods evaluation spanning implementation and outcomes, culminating in a Year Two analysis that used propensity score matching to compare participants against a matched control group, followed by economic modeling of downstream healthcare savings.
The findings gave ALTSD and legislative appropriators credible, defensible evidence that the program was doing what it was designed to do — evidence built to withstand scrutiny from funders, legislators, and auditors alike.
As Executive Director of Government Relations for Presbyterian Healthcare Services, Michael led the health system's legislative strategy on two of the most consequential health policy fights in recent New Mexico sessions.
On medical malpractice reform, he was part of the coalition behind House Bill 99 (2026), which introduced tiered caps on punitive damages and raised the standard of proof required to award them — reforms aimed at stabilizing a malpractice environment that has contributed to doctor shortages statewide. Presbyterian funded the "Keep NM Doctors" public campaign in support of the effort, and the bill was signed into law with bipartisan support.
On hospital consolidation oversight, Michael worked through the 2025 session as the Legislature moved to regulate hospital mergers and acquisitions. He was part of the effort that opposed the original Senate Bill 14, which ultimately died in committee, then helped negotiate House Bill 546 — an emergency replacement that extended and revised the state's hospital merger oversight framework into a version the health system could support.
As Senior Policy Officer at the Thornburg Foundation, Michael led the creation of the New Mexico Early Childhood Funders Group (now the New Mexico Early Childhood Funders Alliance), pooling philanthropic resources to advocate for home visiting and fund development of an early childhood business plan. That plan helped drive the creation of both the Early Childhood Education and Care Department and the Early Childhood Trust Fund — a permanent endowment that has since grown to roughly $10 billion and now underwrites the state's universal child care program. The coalition also brought legislators on site visits to home-visiting programs and child care sites to make the case for investment firsthand, helping spark a legislative early childhood caucus along the way. This work later earned Michael and a fellow advocate the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce's Excellence in Education award.
Michael also created a parallel K-12 funders group to coordinate philanthropic investment in principal residencies, superintendent licensure pathways, and an independent study of teacher professional development effectiveness.
When COVID-19 hit, Michael helped the early childhood funders' coalition move quickly, launching an emergency response grants program to support New Mexico's youngest children and the child care providers serving them through the crisis.
This approach — concentrating resources, showing up in community, and committing to long-term, flexible funding rather than short project grants — was later profiled by Exponent Philanthropy as a model of catalytic, equity-centered leadership in philanthropy.
With teacher vacancies making national headlines, Michael worked closely on the passage of New Mexico House Bill 13, which raised minimum teacher residency stipends to $35,000 and funded stipends for mentors and training-site principals — support that helped the state's residency programs scale to prepare more than 400 teacher residents, about a third of all newly licensed teachers in New Mexico.
He served on the steering committee for the Albuquerque Teacher Residency Partnership (since renamed) alongside Marjori Krebs, Ellen Bernstein, and Karen DeMoss of Prepared to Teach. Thornburg funded an independent evaluation of the partnership by the National Center for Teacher Residencies, which verified its effectiveness at preparing and retaining teachers in New Mexico classrooms.
Prepared to Teach is developing further documentation of this work, not yet publicly available.
Michael represented the Thornburg Foundation on the Northern New Mexico Pathways to Opportunity Strategy Table and served on its steering committee, working closely with LANL Foundation's Alvin Warren to help build the region's first pooled fund of its kind. The Northern New Mexico Youth Fund combines philanthropic, tribal, state, and federal resources to support career technical education and work-based learning for underserved youth, including Opportunity Youth, Native American youth, and young parents, across the northern part of the state.
Since launching, the fund has awarded more than $1.8 million to organizations across Northern New Mexico, with a goal of pooling over $13 million in public and philanthropic funding by 2027.
A statewide evaluation of PreK, K-3 Plus, and early-grade retention policy, built on classroom visits to 12 elementary schools and analysis of over 25,000 third-grade student records.
An evaluation of why roughly half of New Mexico's recent high school graduates needed remedial coursework in college, at a statewide cost of $22 million a year.
Every recommendation traces back to data — not the other way around.
Designs that hold up to legislators, auditors, and skeptical boards.
Experience across classrooms, agencies, foundations, and health systems.
Rigor scaled to the decision at hand — not more, not less.