Choosing
meaningful work

I grew up on the East Coast in a loving family with five kids. We were blessed with enough of everything and not too much of anything and we had freedom to roam in a safe suburb. My mother read us poetry when we were little and my father commuted into New York where he was an executive accounts manager at an insurance company. One time a client was very rude to him over the phone and my father asked him to call back when he could be more respectful. My father’s boss challenged him, but my father said, “How could I go home and teach my children self-respect if I let him talk to me that way?”

My values are my bedrock and they are grounded in treating everyone with respect and taking pride in a job well done.

I went to a women’s college, then decided that was not for me. I transferred and was one of the first seven women to graduate from Williams College, and later served on the board for 5 years. After a year on a fellowship in Italy and two short-term jobs in fundraising for universities, I moved to California and got an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

I went to work at a major San Francisco advertising agency, Foote, Cone & Belding, where I worked on accounts like Clorox, Pacific Bell, Novell and Nintendo. In 1996 I pitched Amazon and was the group director of their branding and advertising for three years, initially when there were only 20 people in the entire company!

While at the agency, I brought on a children’s advocacy group, Children Now, as a pro bono client. I was asked to be on their board and served the organization for the past 25 years, 11 as board chair. My passion for working on behalf of children comes from all the nurturing my parents gave me and I was able to give my own daughter. Every child should have that kind of love and opportunity.

I left advertising to start my own business with my long-time colleague, Joe Rodriguez. We wanted to take all the strategic, story-telling and start-up skills we had developed working with for-profit clients and apply them to social impact challenges. We take special pride in being the lead architects and momentum builders for The Big Lift, an ambitious venture to close the opportunity gap for low-income kids in San Mateo County.

I am a volunteer and board member for ARCS, a group that raises $1 million a year for outstanding science graduate students in Northern California, and am also a member of the Advisory Council for the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

My greatest joy is my daughter, who earned a PhD in Environmental Studies from UC Santa Cruz and has helped protect the environment as a college and graduate level teacher, through policy work for the Coastal Commission, and as a California Science and Technology Policy Fellow with the California State Legislature.

I am grateful for the many blessings of my life and for meaningful work.

I hail from a long line of Hispanic leaders, social activists, and entrepreneurs. My great-grandfather was kicked out of Spain for unionizing coal miners in the 1920s; my uncle built one of the largest ranches in New Mexico by using green farming methods; my mom went house-to-house to recruit and teach the first class of Head Start students in our community; and my father was a high school history teacher and nationally-known track coach who helped 45 athletes win college scholarships.

I was raised on inspiring stories about Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, and the Kennedy brothers. My family encouraged me to notice the injustices of the world and then do something to change things for the better.

I came out at the University of Maryland and created a support group for LGBT college students in the D.C. area.. While studying for an MBA at University of Wisconsin, I was asked to head up the campus gay lesbian awareness week and invited the novelist and civil- and gay-rights icon James Baldwin to address the student body. In my early thirties, I served on the board of the first political action committee in America to focus on funding LGBT candidates for public office.

I started my career working on consumer packaged goods brands at advertising agencies like DDB and Saatchi, eventually meeting my business partner Jane Gardner at Foote, Cone & Belding in San Francisco. There, we worked together on launching network software for Novell, where I went on to run global marketing communications. An early player in the Internet revolution, I was an executive for three start-up companies and led corporate marketing at Macromedia. I was one of the few Hispanic or openly gay leaders in the marketing field at the time, and advocated for the high-tech sector to be more inclusive by hiring more women and minorities as well as adopting anti-discrimination policies that protected gay employees.

In my late forties I re-imagined my business life, joining forces again with Jane, providing strategic planning, CSR counsel, and branding expertise for organizations that are breaking new ground AND doing good in the world. Developing The Big Lift initiative has been one of the highlights of my career, helping thousands of low-income kids – many of them with surnames like mine -- get the right start in life. I am a longtime mentor and advocate for children in other ways, parenting a young man since he was five years old and helping to pass a pioneering California law to prohibit conversion “therapy” on LGBT kids.

In recent years, I was a national grassroots leader for the presidential campaigns of Pete Buttigieg and then Joe Biden. Inspired by the wisdom of Buddhism, I also give Dharma talks and co-chaired the DEIA committee of the San Francisco Zen Center Board. Following the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, I became deeply involved in helping over 60 LGBTQI leaders, human rights defenders, and women and children escape from the Taliban and find new homes in Canada, Germany, and the United States.

Working for change is often messy but beautiful work. I feel fortunate to have a life that is rich in purpose, has deep connections, and allows me, as Bobby Kennedy once said, to send forth “tiny ripples of hope.”