Teaching, Learning & Tech advances policies and practices that help educators, technologists, and researchers design and use technology to strengthen learning for young people. We take a human-centered approach to understanding and addressing the needs of all learners in a rapidly evolving digital age—from early childhood through postsecondary pathways.

We center and elevate the voices of students, families, educators, community leaders, and practitioners whose lived experience and professional expertise inform how technology can meaningfully support teaching and learning. Their insights guide our research, policy recommendations, and design of responsive tools and resources.

Our build4good initiative pairs higher ed students with mission-driven organizations to build tools addressing real community needs—expanding local capacity and creating pathways to public-interest technology careers.

The Future Security Scenarios Lab at New America helps decision makers navigate accelerating technological change, geopolitical volatility, and mounting global risks by integrating advanced foresight tools with insights from decision theory. Using scenario planning, forecasting, strategic simulations, and systems analysis, the Lab examines how cognitive biases, mental models, and human judgment shape national security outcomes, equipping leaders to anticipate emerging challenges, stress-test assumptions, and design more resilient strategies for an uncertain world.

Grounded in a mission that spans AI and nuclear futures, internal force multiplication across New America, and broader field building, the Lab explores how technologies and shifting power dynamics interact with the cognitive foundations of security. By pairing structured foresight with an understanding of how decisions are actually made under uncertainty, the Lab democratizes security thinking, cultivates a diverse community of practitioners, and delivers actionable insights that help policymakers respond with clarity, agility, and confidence.

The Future of Work and Innovation Economy initiative (FOWIE) at New America advances policy solutions and practice change at the intersection of workforce, economic development, and emerging technology ecosystems to strengthen and expand the American middle class.

We envision an economy that creates family-sustaining jobs, provides clear pathways into them, and uses emerging technologies to improve the quality of human work.

We organize our work around three pillars:

• Regional Innovation Ecosystems & Economic Renewal: Foster policies and practices that grow regional innovation ecosystems in areas of economic stagnation, decline, or at the risk of being left behind amidst technological change.
• Workforce Pathways & the Innovation Economy: Support policies & practices changes that expand affordable and reliable workforce pathways as technological innovation and diffusion change labor markets.
• Workers & Technology: Advance approaches that encourage collaboration among workers, technologists, and employers in shaping the future of AI and emerging technologies.

The Future of Proxy Warfare Initiative is a joint project of New America’s Future Security program and Arizona State University’s Center on the Future of War. The initiative examines the role of proxy warfare in today’s conflicts, and the ways globalization, technological advances, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the rise of transnational non-state movements reshapes requires an update of the way policymakers and scholars study and understand the character of proxy warfare and its current manifestations in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, among other places.