A nonprofit foundation for Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico keeps losing its people.We are building the opportunity to stay.
Puerto Rico has always been extraordinary: its culture, its people, its place in the world. What too many of its young people cannot find here is opportunity, so they leave. We are here to change that: to show them the opportunity that already exists, and to help create more over time.
The problem
Not a slow decline. An exodus.
Puerto Rico is losing the people it needs most: the young, the working-age, the ones who would build its future. The loss feeds on itself, and it is reshaping the island faster than almost any population on record.
439,915
residents lost in a single decade: an 11.8 percent drop from 2010 to 2020, the steepest in the island's modern history.
U.S. Census, 2020
The research is blunt about the cause. People do not leave mainly for a bigger paycheck. They leave when they cannot see a future being built where they are. In the one Puerto Rico profession studied closely, doctors, the strongest predictor of leaving was not income: it was the belief that the island has no future. That belief, more than any tax incentive, is what the island has to change.
About 1 in 3
Puerto Rico-born people now live on the U.S. mainland: a diaspora nearly the size of the island itself.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
+1.4% vs −15.8%
what the economy would have grown over 2008 to 2022 with a stable population, federal auditors estimate. Instead it shrank.
U.S. Government Accountability Office
265 schools
closed, as public-school enrollment fell 44 percent from 2006 to 2018 and families followed the jobs off the island.
Centro (Hunter College) and the Lumina Foundation
Our approach
Make the future here visible, honest, and reachable.
If people leave because they cannot see a future, the highest-leverage thing we can do is make the real one legible. Not propaganda, not “stay out of loyalty,” but the complete, honest picture of what building a life in Puerto Rico actually looks like, and a credible path to it.
- 01
Show the real opportunity
Every career that fits a person, the demand for it on the island, what it pays and what you keep after local incentives, where to study it, and what pays for the studying. Grounded in real data, not vibes.
- 02
Earn trust by telling the whole truth
That includes straight answers about leaving and about mainland pay. Completeness is what earns trust, and trust is what gets people through the door at all. Stay-first, never stay-only.
- 03
Build for the long game
Reversing a loss this deep takes years, so we design for durable outcomes: whether a young person is still building a life on the island in five years, not one-time signups. Further out, the same work could one day help some who left find a way home, a horizon we earn once the opportunity here is real.
No single tool does all of this. So we are building them in sequence, starting with the one that changes the most, the soonest.
The roadmap
One problem, many tools, built in the order our resources allow.
We can see the whole problem and the whole toolkit it would take to solve it. What we cannot do is build it all at once. This roadmap is sequenced by resources and time, not by the limit of what Puerto Rico needs. With more support, more of it happens sooner.
- 01
Step 1 · Now
coqui.work
A career coach for Puerto Rico's students, grounded in a knowledge graph of real island data: jobs, study, and aid. It walks each student the full route: the careers that fit them, demand and pay on the island, where to study, and what pays for it.
- 02
Step 2 · Next
Connect to opportunity and to employers
Turn guidance into placement. Connect students and returnees to real Puerto Rico jobs, apprenticeships, and employers, so the path does not end at “here is a good career” but at “here is the job.”
- 03
Step 3 · A longer horizon
A way home, someday
Much further out, and only once the opportunity here is real and visible enough to make it honest, the same engine could help some in the diaspora find a credible route home. A horizon we name, not a year-one promise.
Why coqui.work is the right first step
It meets people at the decision
What to study and where is decided once, early, and usually with almost no real information. Better information at that moment changes a life's trajectory.
It scales
Software can reach every student on the island for a fraction of the cost of one-on-one career counseling per child, in a place where it is stretched thin.
It builds the foundation everything else needs
The same data graph and the same trust with students and families are what Steps 2 and 3 are built on. The first tool is also the groundwork.
It is the lever the research points to
Make real opportunity legible and trustworthy. That is exactly what this tool does, and it is what the evidence says actually moves the decision to stay or go.
Why it matters
A student in Bayamón, in twenty minutes.
She finishes a conversation knowing four careers that genuinely fit her, the island's demand for each, what they pay and what she actually keeps, where to study them and what tuition costs, and the scholarships that cover it. Before she picks a program, not after.
Incentives and tax figures are verified against current law before they are shown. Act 60 was amended in 2025.
What she saw in one conversation
- median nursing salary in Puerto RicoU.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- $39,880
- new openings a year in that field on the islandPuerto Rico employment projections
- 1,630
- tax on the first $40,000 of salary, ages 16 to 26Youth exemption, verified Jun. 2026
- $0
- Pell Grant cap, which covers full tuition at many island programsU.S. Department of Education
- $7,395
Get involved
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Every gift gives more students the complete picture of their future on the island, before it is too late to use it. Your support funds the coach, the pilot, and the work of keeping talent home.
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