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The PM Podcast
An Idea Whose Time Has Come: A Conversation with Rey Saldaña, President and CEO of Communities In Schools
01:07:33
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- [00:00]
Ray Saldana
All of a sudden, schools recognizing how critical the role they were playing for all of the non academic issues that students are bringing into them is the reason we exist at CIS. And so we actually have grown since 2020 at a faster clip than we have ever grown in our entire organization's history. And it's 50 years. So to give you a sense of that, it took us 45 years to get to 2,500 schools that we were serving in at the time I became CEO in 2020. Today we are in 1200 schools on top of that, in just the five to six years.
- [00:34]
Jay Frost
Welcome to the PM podcast brought to you by Evertru Studios, the show that takes you inside the lives of thought leaders, innovators and change makers in fundraising, philanthropy and civil society. I'm your host, Jay Frost. My guest today is Ray Saldana, President and CEO of Communities and Schools, the national organization that surrounds students with a community of support, empowering them to stay in school and achieve in life. A CIS alumni alumnus, Ray's journey from student to national leader reflects the mission of the organization he now leads. Born and raised on the south side of San Antonio, Ray is the son of immigrants from Mexico and a graduate of Stanford University where he earned a Master's degree in education and received the President's Award for the Advancement of the Common Good. Before taking the helm of communities and Schools, he served as Regional Advocacy Director for the Raise youe Hand Texas foundation, as Chair of the San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Agency, and as the youngest person ever elected to the San Antonio City Council, serving four terms focused on education, public transportation and opportunity for working families. In this episode, we begin in San Antonio, where communities and schools first shaped his path, then trace his journey to leading the organization at a defining moment, taking the helm as the pandemic shut down schools nationwide, stewarding a transformational gift from Mackenzie Scott, and advancing an ambitious vision to expand CIS to more Title I schools across America. I'll just begin by asking you about where it all began for you. And I understand that you're from the south side of San Antonio, but for those who don't know Texas well and certainly don't know San Antonio well, what does that mean? What is that community like? What was it like for you?
- [02:24]
Ray Saldana
Yeah, well, growing up in San Antonio and specifically the south side of the city, you recognize pretty quickly. Then you're in a side of town that is often overlooked. And I think you even get those signals as a 5 year old, like I would have gotten them as a 15 year old and it probably is a bit of a sort of a story of cities all across the country. But I like to think about it in this way. Growing up, I used to be infatuated with a PC game that was called SimCity. And SimCity was when you got the chance to build a city from scratch on your computer and you get to decide where everything goes. I sometimes tell folks that growing up on the south side of the city was like growing up on the type of the. On the side of the town that was often overlooked or ignored or historically, you know, under invested in. And you could see that in everything from, you know, the sidewalks or the drainage when it was pouring rain out, or you could see it in the feel of, you know, what you were with, the schools you were going to and when you would say, compete at an academic competition across town and say to yourself, wow, we are actually a little further behind than we had expected. And I think that was a feeling I never really shook growing up through middle and high school, that maybe I was born on the wrong side of town. And I didn't know really how to make sense of it other than to say, my job is to try to escape this. And I love San Antonio. And the thing about the city or the community you're from is you don't necessarily tap into that love unless you've left it. And that's for me, how I grew an appreciation for the south side of San Antonio, fell in love with it in a number of different ways and still live here on the south side of San Antonio that many years later. So it's a beautiful community. It's a majority Latino community, many first generation Americans, immigrant, working class. We have a history of military bases in the city of San Antonio. So there's a great overlap in a kind of history of military installations, service members and a blue collar working class community that would have been my neighbors, friends, pew members at church, and just taqueria hosts when I would go down to the local stores.
- [04:45]
Jay Frost
Sure. Well, that was the place that you knew growing up that was home for you. What about for your family? Had they been there a long time? Did they choose to live there? We make this journey, but our parents made a journey before us. What was theirs?
- [04:59]
Ray Saldana
Yeah, great question. My mother grew up in South Texas and South Texas in her definition would be five miles from the Texas Mexico border and a town called Edinburgh. So for folks who are familiar with Texas, that usually is the Valle, the valley. But my father would have come from Mexico and he came from a little town called Savinas. Which was about an hour and a half away from the Texas Mexico border in Mexico. And he would have come undocumented, trying to arrive to Texas and to find home and to find opportunity. And it was that intersection of my mother moving to San Antonio where she was in elementary, and my father making it into not only US and Texas, but landing in a place like San Antonio because that's where work was, that they would have found themselves and called San Antonio especially the place where they could afford to rent and then eventually buy a home on the south side of San Antonio. So I'm first generation American. My mother was born as a US citizen, my father was undocumented and became a citizen in 99. And I have still great memories of going to that citizenship ceremony, but grew up in a mixed status home for much of my early childhood.
- [06:14]
Jay Frost
How did they meet?
- [06:16]
Ray Saldana
They met through mutual friends, they recall. They tell me the story of one of the places where my father worked was a, I think, I don't know if the technical term, it's a slaughterhouse, it's a meat packing processing plant. And there, there's a community of folks, some of of them citizens, some of them without status or without documentation. But it was in that community that he would meet my future uncle. And he was dating his then girlfriend at the time who would have been my mother's sister. And they met at a, a barbecue, Carne Seria, which we say around here. Back when my father would have been maybe about 18 in, my mother would have been 17.
- [07:03]
Jay Frost
Oh, wow. And so they, they met obviously then they were there in San Antonio. You were born there. You described the town in terms of what it, maybe what it lacked and especially in comparison to sim cities, which I guess every community lacks in comparison to that game. But, but what, what is the thing that you love most about it? Because as you said, when you leave a place, somehow then you maybe understand it differently. So when you look back on it now, what did it give to you that you were able to draw from through the journey that you're about to take us on in your own life?
- [07:42]
Ray Saldana
Yeah, I think it gave me and it grew a compassion of people and a compassion for the resilience and the strength of community members coming together. Because in a community like the south side of San Antonio, very blue color community, and you have two parents who are in many cases the glue to not only your family, but to people who, you know that are down the street. So my, I joke that my, you know, my father was the person you came to, if Anything ever broke in your house or with your vehicle. So he was both the mechanic and the handyman. And then my mother was the person you went to for a recipe or to take care of kids when you needed an extra childcare assist. And I'm realizing that that was just not just an example in my home, but it was happening all across the community, that people were looking out for one another truly in the spirit of just the spirit of faith, of neighbor, loving neighbor. It was a kind of place that I never saw that unless I got away from it. To really recognize that that isn't just true everywhere. And there's a special feeling to that. Not only that you get to be part of a place that cares for one another, but that place is a part of you. And it's in the food, it's in the music, it's in the celebration, it's in the traditions, it's the quinceaneras. It's learning to dance at the feet of your tias and your grandparents on Saturdays and going late into the evening. So it becomes a kind of celebration of the spirit of the people that you were part of. That I didn't appreciate enough of until I got away from it. And it's what I ran back to immediately when I went away and came back from graduate school.
- [09:21]
Jay Frost
As we're talking about, there's a visual cue for me that people who are listening cannot see, but it's a virtual background of school lockers. I know that in a way that speaks to what you do today, which we're going to talk about, but it also is kind of this constant reminder that all of our lives are really beginning in some way with family and with school. And you talked about how the schools are under resourced, which is true in a lot of places where maybe if they were drawing their money from the tax base, from the housing, then the schools don't have as much in one community as maybe they do in places where the price tag is higher in a house. But there must have been something in the schools that was also kind of a special recipe for you, because you've done quite a lot in your own educational journey, both personally and professionally. So when you think back to the school experience you had, what makes that unique?
- [10:19]
Ray Saldana
Well, what makes it unique in my case, and I think the case of many others, and just to touch on what I mean, when I got a sense of, oh, the kind of school I'm going to maybe isn't the kind of school that other kids experience, and maybe that I'm seeing on television is I remember an instance where, you know, we were at a convocation in my freshman year, and there were about 500 freshmen coming into my high school at the time. But it was a person standing up at the microphone, introducing freshmen to the high school that literally said, you know, that many of you will not make it to graduation and that there will be, you know, there's 500 of you today, and we'll be lucky if 2 to 300 become the graduating class. And I think it animated for many of us, like, the stakes, the people, the sort of, I guess, fire that we should have to try to push through the statistics. But it certainly was a loud call. I meant, and ultimately the statistics and turned it out to be true. We graduated with about 300 in that school. And I think, for me, the experience was I didn't want to be a statistic. And I was trying everything I could to find things that would help me break that mold or get out of a cycle, that folks had expectations around who I was and what I could accomplish. But the problem is that you sometimes have to look around and make some definitional choices about what's next for you or what direction or path or what aspiration you might shoot for. And that's really difficult when that future is clouded by some of the sort of aspirations or the expectations of folks around you. So what you look for is people who've done it. And I think what I had is I ran into a person who. His name at the time was Mrs. Gladys Reyes. And Mrs. Gladys Reyes was at my high school. She was somebody who I thought worked for the school, the school district, but she actually was placed there by a nonprofit called Communities and Schools. And I recall getting to be introduced in that handoff to Mrs. Reyes. And because a student of mine said, or a classmate said, hey, you know, if you are interested in a summer program, they actually pay for it. There is a person who you need to talk to, and she's in the third wing. Go knock on the door. I don't know if it's part of a program, but Mrs. Reyes just asked for her. I didn't know that she was part of communities and schools. I realized that she was there not only looking for students like me, but actually doing a lot of outreach herself to find those students who. Who not just maybe are interested in college or summer programming, but for those who may be falling through the cracks. And so I ran into a caring adult who had a different vision of what was possible for me. And not only was Able to be a sort of trailblazer on the path that I didn't realize I could go on, but that was there to remove any barriers that might stand in the way. And that's something for a young person who had two parents that didn't make it past the eighth grade for important reasons, they had to get to work or they, you know, this just wasn't in the cards for them. It's hard to look for those answers in your own family or in your own community. And finding somebody like Mrs. Reyes really made a difference on the trajectory of my life. And it was not by accident that she was in my high school. And I'm. I now more. I know more and more now because I lead the organization that it was by design. But my experience was getting to run into somebody who really changed my life in an important way.
- [13:37]
Jay Frost
I have so many questions about that, but one is just how do you know someone that you can trust someone in a moment like that? Because if you just heard from, I don't know who that was speaking to you all, the principal or something, and you must have been just 14 or 15 when they said, sorry, but you know, two fifths of you guys are going to be gone. That must have been shocking. No matter how bright you are, no matter how animated your vision for yourself must be, it's still shocking. But then to have somebody there who maybe offers another path, how do you know you can trust them?
- [14:07]
Ray Saldana
The truth is, you can't know that. And one of the things that we know a lot about at communities and schools is that it's not programs that are transforming young people's lives. It's relationships. And the question is, whose role is it? Who is in charge of building deep, trusting relationships with young people in schools and with teachers who are as overburdened as they are with counselors who are working with 750 to 1 caseloads or principals who are trying to lead the school. It becomes nobody's responsibility. And so the problem is that I didn't really trust a lot of the adults who were kind of trying to surround themselves. I could understand what a teacher needed from me and the expectations were. And for the two to three months of getting to know Mrs. Ray's, there was a lot of testing of her and her probably trying to break through me and many other students that she was working with. And that's what's so hard about our work at communities and schools, is that we know that that tension exists. We know that when we ask when Mrs. Reyes would ask me, ray, how are you doing? I would give her the standard, I'm fine, all good. And that would go on probably for the entire first semester. And it wasn't until a few instances of getting to know her and her getting to know me. And I just described to her, here's who my father is, here's who he was growing up, here's what he means to me. And you know, we didn't. We don't have a lot at home and we can't maybe afford that community college summer program because that means that I have to be away from home Monday through Friday. And I don't think my parents will actually allow me to do those kinds of things. And, well, why don't you let me talk to your mother? Or why don't you let me worry about the fee for that program? And okay, but we're testing each other. And that happens still today with many young people who are so good at hiding. And I think I was very good at hiding through elementary and middle school. I didn't want to talk to anybody about the fact that my father was undocumented for most of my educational career. I was worried, I was fearful. Who could I trust with that information? But when you build a bond with somebody, you want to tell them about things you think could stand in your way. And I always figured, you know, I didn't have family who'd gone to college. I didn't have family family who understood what an AP exam was or who could understand how to write an essay or to edit that essay for me. And Mrs. Ray has helped me open up in a way that, you know, didn't happen over one semester or a few months. It took time. And I say to people often that our work is not rocket science. It's more complicated than that. If you think about the brains and the insides of teenagers and the problems that they're dealing with, that's. That's difficult work. Work.
- [16:45]
Jay Frost
I'm imagining that when you're having that kind of relationship build and the trust is being built, and then you're able to see some of the things that you might want to do come to fruition, that it must be challenging going home too, because you could have the most loving family in the world. It certainly sounds like you did. But then your parents experience would have been different from your own. This is true for every kid and every parent, but particularly if they didn't have that, let's say, that college experience, that guidance counsel looking out for them, and also two different, you know, national Experiences before they work together. So what was it like then going back home and, and, and starting to. When you felt you could share about. Well, this is what I imagine and this is the trajectory I think I'm on.
- [17:33]
Ray Saldana
I, I was one of the type of kids, and I'm not uncommon in this way who would not talk a lot about things that I felt would put me out of place or make my parents feel intimidated. And I think that's a first generation experience. That's a poverty experience. It's a. Look, I'm dealing with an issue. But I, I know my parents are overburdened with enough. I don't want to add something like a college program that cost 120 bucks for the summer. And that's not something I want to put on them. So it was a lot of. Maybe if I was going to suffer it would be a little bit in silence. And if I were coming to them on any issues, you're right that they would have been 100% supportive and the plate sale or the yard sale, all of that would have taken place. But we, I think as maybe, maybe we're strivers as first generation or working in low income communities and understand we also don't want to overburden our parents with the kind of thing that might frighten them, that we might also face some rejection that we're worried about. It's like, why would you be thinking that that's not something that we could accomplish? I didn't know what to expect. But you are right. That's the thing that breaks my heart so much about many, especially first generation, but many students who have incredible support systems at home. And sometimes the question of trust with issues that are outside of maybe the knowledge of parents just falls on no ears. And I think that limits and really tempers the kind of ambition that many young people can have. And so the question of finding a trusting and caring adult sometimes who is not a member of your family is so key. And people find it in mentors, they find it in coaches or that one teacher who made a difference in their life. And we hope at the organization it's through our staff whose job it is to connect with those students who might be most at risk. But yeah, I had a personal feeling of, of feeling like I didn't want to disrupt something going on at home or maybe have a fear of rejection.
- [19:30]
Jay Frost
Yeah. But at some point clearly you needed to have that conversation because you did go off to college and you didn't go to someplace that cost 120 bucks. So help us understand where the journey took you next. So you were going to graduate. You obviously did well in school. What made you choose to do what you did next? And how did you. You make your path there? And how did you communicate that to these people you loved so much?
- [19:57]
Ray Saldana
Yeah, I'll answer that by connecting Mrs. Reyes right into the center of this story, because it is I, for a long time, didn't know what college application process were like or essay editing and writing, but I remember that she got a hold of an application to a school I had never heard of in California called Stanford. And she said, look, I've seen your grades. I know your story. Most of these colleges really care about bringing students with powerful testimony. And you shared with me a story about your father and how you feel about him. And one of the essays says, in particular, the one from Stanford said, submit a picture that says a thousand words and tell us what those thousand words are. And I brought in a picture of my father, who it was a picture of him in the center of a group of four or five others at the meat processing plant. And he was in the center, not wearing a hard hat. But I tell the story of what it was like grabbing his hard hat every, every day when he would come back from work. And he smelled pretty funky because he worked at a meat processing plant. But I told the story of that smell, reminding me of a story that he once explained to me happened when I used to love running around in his hard hat and, you know, feeling like every young son for their father. Their the strongest, they're the smartest, they're the sharpest. You want to be just like him. And I'd put on his hard hat trying to do just that. And I remember telling that story and my father also taking that hard hat from me and at one age and saying, look, you're not allowed to wear this. Like I wear this so that one day you can have a life where you don't have to wear a hard hat, where you wear a different kind of hat. Your graduation, you play baseball, you can wear your baseball cap, but this is not the kind of life for you. I live this life. And I began to understand my story and to tell it. And Mrs. Reyes helped me understand the strength in that story. And I remember submitting that as my Stanford application and getting an acceptance letter several months later and then saying to myself, like, this is a huge ticket. Like, I just got accepted to one of the best universities in the country. And then I had the sinking feeling that I have to go Tell my parents now. And I remember telling my mother, and the first question she had for me was like, what is Stanford? Where is it? When she found out that it was several states away, a plane ride. We'd never been on an airplane. She broke down in just tears, thinking, like, you can't go. And so it was a Mrs. Reyes coming into that situation and saying, let me explain to you what this opportunity is. Let me explain to you that you don't have to pay $50,000 a year, that there's scholarships available, there's financial aid. It was one of the first times I realized that we were low income by every measure. As a family of seven. I have five brothers and sisters amongst us, and then my parents, of course, we were making. My father made 26,300 a year and said, look, you will qualify for free and reduced lunch. And so it was that journey, essentially, that Mrs. Reyes was playing, not only to convince them that it was possible we could afford it, but that they would let me go. And that's something that was difficult for my mother to understand. In fact, the funny story is we have a community college down here in San Antonio that is literally, I can walk from out my front door to that school in about 15 minutes. It's that close. It's Palo Alto Community College. And when I told her that Stanford was in Palo Alto, California, she said, I've got the fix for you. You. We've got Palo Alto right in our backyard. You don't need to go out to California. You can. Mrs. Reyes, let me come in and explain to you, Mrs. Saldana, the difference between Palo Alto College and Stanford. Palo Alto. So it was a journey that then got me on an airplane for the first time when I got to go to Stanford, full ride. And that was just a huge life change.
- [23:45]
Jay Frost
Did your parents even know you had applied before you got acceptance?
- [23:50]
Ray Saldana
No, they didn't. And it wasn't uncommon for me and my rest. The rest of my classmates to kind of keep that to us, because you never want to increase anyone's expectations.
- [23:59]
Jay Frost
Sure. Or anxiety. Because. Because on the other side of that is it's not just the financial discussion and all the difference in, you know, leaving home, which I guess every. Every child eventually has that conversation, but it's. It must be this whole bunch of layers of stuff, especially when you have. You said five siblings,
- [24:23]
Ray Saldana
so they're four siblings.
- [24:24]
Jay Frost
So four. Excuse me, four siblings. So then there must have been a whole multitude of conversations about what does this mean for the whole family? What does it mean for me, do I get to do this too? Or you shouldn't do that because you should be here or what was it like talking with your siblings as you were about to make this, this big adventure?
- [24:42]
Ray Saldana
It was absolutely a sense of pride. I think many of them were just surprised to know that I was applying, of course, thrilled to know that I got in. And it was just not an expectation that not only anybody in my family didn't have, but many people in the community. I was the first in my high school to ever be accepted to a place like Stanford. So it's the unusual thing of coming from again, a side of town that there are not a lot of expectations from a kind of school that has never sent anybody to Stanford. To them, somebody actually does it and it's a surprise and shock to everyone. And so, you know, it was a, it was a great celebration, I will say that. And I think them really understanding the, the grips of the potential and the opportunity that this would allow, you know, for my, I was, I'm the youngest, I'm the oldest boy and I've got an older sister and so she was on her way to one of the local colleges as well. So we, we graduated about the same time and it was a different storyline for our entire family. A sense of accomplishment and possibility. And again, I was so worried that none of that would come to fruition that I was always too afraid to actually share that. But I think that's actually a breakthrough for many members of the family who saw this as a really great opportunity. But it had to meet some sense making because we couldn't measure the moment or measure the capacity.
- [26:01]
Jay Frost
And then you said you'd never been on a plane. So you got accepted and you decided to go, you just, you just went to Stanford. Was that the first time you ever went was to go there and then to, to check in as a student or did you have any way of making that transition? Because these transitions can be very tough, especially for folks maybe if they don't feel like they're, that every, that there are a lot of people like them there. So I don't know what it was like for you at Stanford, but did you find community right away? Community is a big theme here in this whole discussion. Did you find folks that you felt like, I don't know, could understand where you came from and you understood where they came from?
- [26:39]
Ray Saldana
You know, surprisingly, a place like Stanford I think was probably the best place I could have possibly ended up again. First generation, never been outside of a, maybe 10 mile radius from my home, other than to get to visit, you know, older family in Mexico. And so getting on a plane for the first time at 18 was my first experience going through a TSA security line. And my father was. You could tell when he dropped me off the airport that they were nervous. I were nervous, I was nervous. I had no instruction on how to do what to do when I actually landed there. But once you get on that campus, there's an embrace, There is a process. There is older RAs, residential assistants who are older classmates who know you by name, seen your picture, welcome you when you get off of that shuttle bus. And I felt that embrace the entire time. And I think having gone to a school like Stanford, who really prides itself on creating community, was exactly what I needed. Sure, there was a lot of shock being away from home and I missed my parents and I couldn't afford getting back home. But you're in there with a group of people who are all there for the first time, and it's a small enough community that I felt that embrace. And to the credit of that university, I think they're still very good at embracing first generation students who are coming in and making sure that they find that space and community.
- [28:00]
Jay Frost
And you didn't just go for the four and then move on or move back. I mean, you went through your master's there as well. So this is studying, I guess, poli sci, communications, education policy. What were you thinking as you went through all this? Did you have a vision for what would come out the other end, or were you just enjoying?
- [28:19]
Ray Saldana
No, I had a vision and it was one that is not the one I actually executed on. So leaving high school, leaving a place like San Antonio, feeling what I was feeling as I described the place that I needed to escape, I felt when I was on this airplane getting to Stanford, that San Antonio's in my rearview mirror, that I've got a golden ticket here and it is my ticket to. To a job with wealth and money, and I'm gonna make more than I'd ever experienced, because that's what the guarantee is from a great university like Stanford. And so, you know, I'm gonna go to finance or I'm gonna go to the big cities, and San Antonio's in my rearview mirror. And it's funny, nothing could have been further from the truth. I left the city. And again, that appreciation for who my community was and what I loved most about the people is what drew me back. And that was not on my mind when I was. Again, when you come from poverty when you come from not having much, all you want to do is initially think that your measure of success is the size of your home or the car you drive. And I had that messaging growing up for 18 years. And there was a rewiring that happened for me at a place like Stanford. And I was fortunate. Took a little bit of a deep, a great detour here, actually. I, I tried out for the baseball team at Stanford and, well, I, I played baseball in high school, but I never figured I, I could be good enough to play at Stanford.
- [29:45]
Jay Frost
Yeah, this is, this is kind of a big detail you left out, so you must. What, what position were you playing?
- [29:51]
Ray Saldana
I was a catcher. Yeah, I was a catcher all through high school. And it was, it was a fortunate opportunity because I said to the coach I wanted to do a visit and say, you know, I'm here on academics, financial aid, you don't need to worry about scholarship. But you all have tried. So we don't really do tryouts. You have to be recruited to come here, but you might be in luck. You know, we could use a bullpen catcher. So why don't you come out, catch a few of our, you know, starting pictures and, yeah, we'll take it from there. And I remember it's probably to this point in my life still one of the scariest moments in my life. Having gone from, you know, as a catcher. If you play baseball and you go to a competitive school, you're lucky if you see, you know, 85, 86 miles per hour being thrown at you and you go to a place like Stanford where these are all American recruited athletes topping out at 95, 98. One of the scariest moments was going into that bullpen and not knowing what to receive, but seeing 98 miles an hour from a 6 foot 7 all American because I wanted to see if I could be a bullpen catcher was very frightening. But it turned out okay. And it turned out to be such an important moment because I had said I'd only been on an airplane once before that when you get to the baseball team, it was such a luxury that I got to be a bullpen catcher. Because you actually travel with the team, you always need an extra bullpen catcher. And so I got to go to places like area Arizona State and UCLA and Oregon and Washington. And I had just seen a different part of the country. And comparing it to my experience growing up was such a contrast that that was such a formative opportunity for me. And, you know, while I didn't get any playing time in college because There were some really great catchers, some of which went on to play professionally, make millions of dollars. I got to see the country through baseball and through Stanford, and, and that was an incredible experience. Yeah, I took a little detour there, but that was my experience before undergraduate and then staying to graduate school before coming back to San Antonio.
- [31:53]
Jay Frost
So you must have been imagining something during all of that, and it was not going to be, you know, mlb. So what, what were you, were you imagining? That you go into education because you went from education when you came out. Right. So teaching adjunct work and then into development work, which is very different, although it was, again, related to education. So help us see how you, how you took that, that road, because that's, that's something that I know many of our listeners will say they fell into development. You came in through education, which is not that common, even in the fundraising part of the nonprofit sector.
- [32:32]
Ray Saldana
Yeah, I am. I was fortunate that one of the scholarships that I received was the Gates Millennium Scholarship. So this is the Bill and Melinda Gates funded support. And so while what financial aid didn't cover for me, I was able to pay for undergraduate with that scholarship, but it was also paying for graduate school under some eligible categories. And one of them that I really wanted and was interested in was going to get my degree in education at the graduate level. And Stanford has one of the best graduate education programs that I was really excited about to get into my senior year. And I began to explore what it could look like because I had a path that I had designed for myself, and I knew not what I wanted to do, but where I wanted to do it, which was I wanted to go back to San Antonio. I was totally designed on wanting to go back home. And my focus was I was going to be back in San Antonio, and I was going to do one of two things. And it was the second thing that I hadn't accounted for, but I was either going to be teaching at the K through 12 level and to try to really get my experience after having spent a year in education, understanding policy, what's behind funding, what's behind so much of the inequities that I maybe have experienced as a young student and bringing that all back to Bayard, San Antonio, that was one path. And then at 23, as I was leaving the graduate school program, it must have been the last month, somebody described to me an opportunity that I think they said it as a joke, and I took it as a serious opportunity. They said, you know what you should think about doing? There's an Opportunity in your district on the south side of San Antonio for a city council seat and you might be good at as an elected official, why don't you run for City council? You'll be the youngest person ever elected. And I took it very serious, and I said, wait, why not? I want to be back in San Antonio. That's my focus. And so I end up being, at the time, 23, finishing up graduate school, and. And I'm designing now how to go back to run a city council campaign for the city of San Antonio.
- [34:28]
Jay Frost
You hadn't even finished the graduate degree yet. You're already. Okay. So again, this is another area where a lot of listeners will not be familiar with the process that is running for office. Fundraising is a huge part of that, but that's only one piece. Another part is this kind of network or relationship building. And you just decided to start knocking on doors, among other things. I know you had a plan, but making sure you don't run afoul of whichever party you decided to run with is usually a part of this equation. How did you manage to, I don't know, make friends with people who probably wanted that seat for themselves?
- [35:09]
Ray Saldana
Gosh, it's an entire sort of case study. And one of the things that I tell young people now who are thinking about running for office is that the hardest part about running for office is deciding you are going to do it. Because after that, there are some strategies and designs, and people will be in your ear about it. But if you are committed to doing it, the hardest part is making the decision to say yes, that I'm committing to what it's going to take. But I would have been finishing up my graduate school program, and I decided to come back. And the good thing about the city Council in San Antonio is these are nonpartisan races. But there was designs on who the next heir apparent of that seat was going to be. And it wasn't going to be me. I remember it was the incumbent's wife who was interested in the seat. So there was a design around an entire community of people who are sort of political insiders rallying support around that person. So that means fundraising. That means endorsements. And I was very much the outside candidate and the whippersnapper. Who does he think he is? He just got here, and he's 23 years old. What is he? Who. What does he think? He can be a city council member. So I had to run into that before I started to get the sort of strategy together about how to knock on doors.
- [36:19]
Jay Frost
How quickly did it Go from oh, isn't that cute? To we gotta take care of this guy because he's trying to take one of our seats.
- [36:28]
Ray Saldana
Well, it was when I. It was when my first fundraising report was due. And so my campaign manager, who was one of my best friends at Stanford, who came in and moved in with me in my mother's home. So here's my mother welcoming me back from my graduate degree and calculating in her mind, okay, you've been at Stanford for five years. Your brain is probably worth about $360,000 or something like that. And you want to now move back in your old room, and you want to run for a position that pays $1,000 a year if you win and it's full time. Okay, none of this makes sense, but okay, you can move back in your room. My roommate, who's my campaign manager, moves into my sister's room. And we have one strategy, which is we need to fundraise and we need to prove that we're not just an unserious candidate. When we think the way to do that is to prove that we actually can raise enough money to run a formidable campaign. And so from the months of, I think, June to December, that first reporting period, in $500 maximum gifts, which was the max that anybody could give you, we were able to raise something like $32,000. And that came from a lot of the Stanford community, some folks in the San Antonio community who liked this story of a young kid who come from the south side, went off to school, graduating, came back. But that was the first signal that we were serious about this. And it wasn't just a good story. It was a story that might actually lead to some problems to the person who wanted to take that seat.
- [37:59]
Jay Frost
Why did you really want to have that seat? What did you imagine? Was this another way of building a community that you imagined? Or were there specific policy goals? Why do this?
- [38:10]
Ray Saldana
Yeah, one, I was actually infatuated with the idea of being back and serving in public office because of the experience I had with people in power. I didn't tell this story, but it was actually. Some of it was during high school. And I know Mrs. Reyes was connecting me with this program, but I was part of an organization called Books in the Barrio. And it was a community organization that was built for one purpose, which is to try to get a bookstore on the south side of the city. Again, to this discrepancy between my side of town and other sides, the of it was arguing at that point in the early 2000s that we didn't actually have a bookstore that said something about what folks felt in that community. So we were fighting for it. We were putting up flyers, we were protesting. We were sort of fist in the air. But none of our pleas and work and efforts was leading to anything until a local elected official, city councilman at the time, picked up our cause and picked up the phone and started calling businesses like Borders and Half Price Books. That all of a sudden there was attention driving to this issue that we were trying to approach. That I never forgot that experience. And I think that told me something about what would it take to actually be part of transforming or changing or improving a community. That there's something to this question of power and elected office. And I had seen enough communities through Stanford and through baseball, where I know that we were left behind as a community and getting to see places like San Francisco and access to parks and access to community clinics, universities, those are things that I didn't see on my side of town. And I said, if I were to run for office, I want to be in my community and I want to ask this question of why we're such an inequitable city. If this was SimCity, somebody built this not on accident, but by design. And I want to be intentionally designing it to bring back support for these communities that have been ignored and underinvested. So that was kind of the narrative and that was what was animating me, Wanting to be a person who was in a decision making role. And, you know, that had everything to do with things like public access to infrastructure projects to where you spend a million dollars when you have access to it. So that was the campaign and that was a long five months of knocking on doors. 3,000 that I knocked on. And that's what led to a successful. For four terms on the city council.
- [40:28]
Jay Frost
Yeah. Which is pretty remarkable because you must have been among the youngest to serve not just on that city council, but in the state.
- [40:36]
Ray Saldana
Yeah. At 23, I was the youngest city councilman in the city's history. And I had to deal with every joke about is this kid running for the city council or the student council all along the way? And then I finally get in office. And there was a seriousness that had to be reckoned with when, you know, I was. Now, I was not a staffer, I was a city council member. And city staff had to accommodate to that. But that was, yeah, an important moment in just learning and being part of my community in a different way.
- [41:02]
Jay Frost
And you had to support yourself during all of that. So was that when you Were working with KIP as a CDO and then working with, raise your hand Texas. And I mean how, how are you splitting your life between public service? Because this will come back to, I know where we're really going to go with community service schools. Splitting between that public service role, but also just needing to put food on the table and have that kind of role. Working with an educational organization like KIPP was or Communities and Schools is.
- [41:31]
Ray Saldana
Yeah, it would have been 2011 when I was elected and it is the rules in a place like San Antonio where the position is non paid, essentially it's $1,000 a year. It necessitates you get another job. And I'd been adjunct for about a year or two years and then an opportunity came by and I had been really familiar with the leadership of KIPP San Antonio Charter School. That's across the country, but it was also here in San Antonio and I'd gotten to know a lot of the San Antonio community and been fundraising for my elected position that I think the idea was from the executive director at the time, Mark Larson, who was leading, hey, wouldn't you, you know, you care about education, you've got a degree in it. Would you come out and help us to make sure that we are helping to fundraise for the capital construction or the building of new schools or the support of our team and staff. And I had never done fundraising in that capacity before, but that was my introduction in 2013 and I did that for about three to four years because yes, you're right, by the time I turned 28, I wanted to ask my then girlfriend to become my fiance and I had to ask her for father for her hand. And he wondered, so are you going to get a job? How are you going to support my support my daughter in a. If you're only getting paid a thousand bucks a year? So yes, I needed to get a job. That means I could have moved out of my parents house, which I did till about the age of 27, 28. So that was part of the work that I started. And then ultimately after leaving the city council, joined a Texas foundation. It was called raise your hand Texas.
- [43:06]
Jay Frost
And then that. How did that take you back to this place that you knew so well, communities and schools? I mean you, you had that experience with it personally as part of your, you know, I guess emergence. But what, what brought you back? How did you hear about it? How they realized that you were there? There are a lot of people involved with communities in schools. You were. So did they already kind of have you in their sights as well?
- [43:29]
Ray Saldana
They. They did. And so when I was an elected official, I would constantly talk about my journey to become somebody who got in college and was running for office. And part of that journey was getting to talk about the programs that were part of my changing my trajectory. And so I would talk about communities and schools. And as an organization, we're a federated network. So the national office where I am president, CEO, oversees the entire organization across the country, but really is independent chapters called Communities and Schools of San Antonio. So I was well connected with the local affiliate, and so had done a few events with them, really promoting and helping to fundraise for their local work. But that put me on the radar of the national office as an alumni who was also an elected official. And then I was asked in 2016 to be the first alumni of the program to join the National Board of Directors. And so I've been on the National Board of Directors for about few years as an alumni while I was serving on the City Council as an elected official. And that's when I got to know the breadth of this national exposure of the organization, but got to know CIS through that. But it was through the local affiliate that I'd first gotten to stay connected with CIS and actually still knew and connected with Mrs. Ray as my site coordinator. So that was the tie to CIS of San Antonio.
- [44:44]
Jay Frost
Right. Wow. What was it like serving on the board for you? Was that another kind of City council experience? Because nonprofit boards, even the best organizations, sometimes people are around for a long time. Sometimes the boards are more working boards and fundraising boards or the opposite. How was it to come into that kind of apparatus and, you know, find a place for yourself where you could really help the organization to advance?
- [45:09]
Ray Saldana
Yeah, it was a. It was a profound moment of learning for me about an organization that I had only just a very siloed experience of. If I sort of think about. I'm a product of the program. So in many ways, I know it inside out. I know what it does because it transformed my life. But I didn't recognize it almost as a national nonprofit with scale and a kind of operation that I was introduced to while I was on the board of directors that has to grapple with important questions around federal funding and state legislative advocacy, supports, fundraising cycles, and the relationship between national philanthropy, state philanthropy, and local philanthropy to help sustain the work and growth and to really envision expansion. So it was a. It was a kind of exposure to so many dimensions about running a national nonprofit that really exposed me to a level of understanding about a really great concept and idea that meets its. Its place. Rubber meeting the road with students. But all of what happens behind the scene for Mrs. Reyes to not only be paid and supported by a data system, but why she's in cis. Why is CIS in the south side of San Antonio versus another part of the city? How is that funded? What's the origin story for how it got from one school in Atlanta in 1977 to my high school in 1993? It's a. An incredible journey of an organization's history that I got to be keyed in on. And you get to sit at the table with these incredibly powerful people. Mrs. Elaine Wynn, who was our board chair. Elaine Wynn, formerly of the Las Vegas Wynn Hotels, and people like Shaquille o' Neill are on this board. Secretary Arne Duncan. So it was a real important place of learning and exposure.
- [46:57]
Jay Frost
And then it. It wasn't long really before you took on this role. So presumably you were recruited, I guess in this case by your colleagues to serve as the CEO. And the organization is now 50 years old, so there's a lot of history there. Had they ever had someone who had been a participant in the program serve as the head of communities and schools?
- [47:22]
Ray Saldana
No. This was breaking new ground for them. And there's only ever been four leaders, including myself, so three prior who have led the organization. One was our founder from about 1977 to 2003. So a significant stretch. And he's got the war stories and the scar tissue to prove it. And then after that, there was a internal elevation of a staff member. His name is Dan Cardinale, who was a vice president who became the CEO for about 15 years, and then my predecessor, who was a state superintendent in Nevada, so to give you a sense and flavor of their background. But I would have been the first product of the program to now be leading the organization in 2020.
- [48:02]
Jay Frost
And that was quite a heady time. I mean, I don't know when it was in relation to the beginning of the pandemic, but there are a lot of issues that you do with the communities and schools, and rather than my trying to summarize them or people having to look it up, if you were to give the proverbial elevator speech for what you do at communities in schools, which I know is hard because you do a lot, what would that be? And then maybe give us a picture about how that has altered as a result, not just of your experience in bringing that to bear, but also coming through what may have been the most challenging Time in recent memory for education.
- [48:39]
Ray Saldana
Yeah, Let me do my best here by describing what this feels like as a announced leader of the organization, alumni of the program feeling very prideful about that. But your first day is March 9, 2020. So literally at the beginning of the world coming to a close in many ways. But for an organization whose name is communities and schools, there was an existential crisis welling up in me. And you can find it in my journal in those early weeks entries that we were sending 50 million students home for an organization who is focused on not only being inside schools, but our funding model relies on contracts with schools and school districts. And there was so much question marks. So I said, great, first alumni of the program. And I'm going to be the first leader of the organization that's going to turn the lights off at the organization because I can't see how we make it through this. But the opposite could not be more true in terms of how the story played out. It was literally the pandemic and the shaking loose of old ideas about what school was doing and what it could be doing that we had to reckon with when we sent 50 million students home. How much of that time in school they were relying on it, not just for academics and enrichment for your subjects and the teachers who were fulfilling their duty, but access to food, access to a safe space where students are. You know, we have duty as CIS site coordinators or even staff in schools to be first reporters if you see things like neglect or violence or abuse. So all of a sudden, schools recognizing how critical the role they were playing for all of the non academic issues that students are bringing into them is the reason we exist at CIS. And so we actually have grown since 2020 at a faster clip than we have ever grown in our entire organization's history. And it's 50 years. So to give you a sense of that, it took us 45 years to get to 2500 schools that we were serving in at the time I became CEO in 2020. Today we are in 1200 schools on top of that in just the five to six years. And that is because principals and superintendents have one of three choices now that they have experienced not just the pandemic, but the serious issues that many students are dealing with, whether those are mental health issues, problems at home, food insecurity, housing insecurity. Our founder likes to say that the work is best described like this, that students cannot get turned on to learning until they're turned on to living. And living is the hard part. So if you want to create schools where learning is possible. You have to attend to the living that a student is dealing with or bringing into the school. Our staff's role in the inside a school is to be the key relationship that a student finds. And for us, we focus on all of those issues outside of what a teacher or principal is focused on. So if a student is coming to school hungry, it is our job to not only know the food bank and the resources that exist in those communities, but to actually get those resources to the student and their families. If the student is couch surfing or lost a loved one and need grief counseling, it is our job to make sure that, that we are finding those students. And we do that with a kind of partnership with our schools that doesn't allow us to be or doesn't necessitate that we're shooting in the dark, that we have access to data inside schools. And that is a very difficult thing to do is one, get permission to work inside a school and then have access to student data. But we can tell you those students who are on their way to be chronically absent, that if a student is missing 30 days of school, there's a more serious issue there that necessitates a kind of level of outreach, a trust building with that student to talk about whether a loved one lost a job. There's a transportation issue, there's an illness. Maybe in a case that I heard about in West Virginia not long ago, a student who was dealing with a toothache that it was in a county that required a root canal, there was no specialist. That student couldn't get access. That psych coordinator literally had to find the closest specialist two counties away, find a transportation, make sure that they have healthcare access they can afford. Afford that. That is not the job of anybody on a school's campus, but it is the job of our school to make sure the students are learning and attending. And the question is, we don't want to add more burdens on top of our teachers and principals plates. Leave that to CIS to focus on all of those non academic supports. So in an elevator pitch really is what we're doing is wraparound student services inside school. We happen to be doing it at a scale that no other organization in the country country is doing it. And so Today we're serving 2 million students annually all across the country in those 3,700 schools that we've grown into. So it is quite an organization and operation. But a lot of that is behind the rigor and research about what we believe we're scaling not just the people, the Mrs. Reyes of the world, but the process that she is implementing. Because you do not get to stay in a school if you can't prove that you. You're solving a problem for those principals or those superintendents around. Attendance, graduation. So many people have known communities and schools as a dropout prevention organization. And we've been very good at that. And it's not that we care about dropout statistics or improving attendance just to improve data. It's because that's what tells us the students who are waving red flags who need our support and that's why we exist.
- [53:50]
Jay Frost
So you explained what happened, but not necessarily why suddenly another 1200 schools opened their doors to you. Did you have to go and knock really hard? Was there more money suddenly available? Were the schools saying, we need help? What was it the magic elixir that opened all these schools to you? And beyond that, how many more are out there that you want to serve?
- [54:12]
Ray Saldana
Yeah, that's a great question. What was in the water in 2020 was there was a recognition amongst, you know, leaders of schools and districts. And we focus on K through 12 and specifically Title 1 schools. Title 1 schools, the definition is that over 40% of a student population are qualifying for free or reduced lunch or low income students. So these are high poverty schools that are our target market because we believe we need to go where there is the most at risk students. That's our target population within those Title 1 schools. And for us, you know, we're at 3,700 schools, but the entire addressable market is 60,000 Title 1 schools all across the country. That's the North Star. And we believe we have a role as an organization to grow into the next, you know, 5 to 6,000 over the next 10 years. But really this is a way we need to be doing school. And so what was in the water in 2020 was that principals were saying, I have three choices. I can build a system to do wraparound student supports myself, or I can work with an outside organization who's got track record or credibility, a data system, because it is very difficult. And we have seen this error happen in the past where you designate a person who's already on the staff, you tap them on the shoulder, maybe it's the PE teacher. And this is a real example. I heard from a superintendent and said, we got a grant from the county for a student support specialist. Now you, PE teacher, are the students support specialist. You start on Monday, go, well, that can work, but it's not going to get you a Kind of impact with data and evidence you're not going to know if you're getting to the right students. So there is a science to this that we have developed. And so I said a principal has three choices. They can do it themselves with the existing staff, bring this to somebody on their own or work with an outside organization. And we happen to be the largest provider of, we call this work integrated. So student supports. There's a science and rigor and research behind how we train our staff. How many students Mrs. Reyes is working with in a given year, what kind of supports. The three tiers, some of them are available to the entire school, something like college advising or high intensive tutoring to a specific group in the Tier 2 status or Tier 3, which I was, which is a case managed student. And so again you can do it yourself, you can hire an outside organization or you can ignore it. The problem is that majority of students or schools all across the country are ignoring the issue of non academic issues that are coming into schools every single day. Whether those are students who are dealing with the issues that are presented by poverty or violence in the home. And if those are unaddressed, you'll never be able to drive outcomes. And so in 2020, so much of that was animating the decision making for school leaders and there was more federal funding available to start really trying a few things. So many of them elected to use the organization communities and schools as an outside option where we have a data system, where we bring in our staff and we have a public private partnership we fundraise to cover the salary of Mrs. Ray is about 30 to 40% and we're a subsidized value for them for a full time staff and an entire agency of work. So that's what led to increased expansion. The question is can that be sustained as we draw down federal funding that is no longer available at the same scale it was in 2021. And can we actually we know the issues are getting, they're mounting for young people that whether it's a mental health crisis or isolation, there is a lot more young people who are falling behind and falling through the cracks. And so principals have not left that three choice option. The question now is just the resources available for it. So that's where we as an organization are trying to step in to help.
- [57:47]
Jay Frost
I wish I knew the stat for the percentage of schools and maybe the number as well. Two different things of Title 1 schools back when communities in schools started in comparison to today because I know we have a big wealth inequality problem. We Also have a huge wealth income inequality problem. And those two things are different as well. And they really impact families and students and they impact the schools. So is this problem growing not just in the. The large ways you were describing, mental health crises, et cetera, but also that shrinking of resources that are available for a problem that is potentially really growing in scale?
- [58:27]
Ray Saldana
One of the things that we sort of pin and we need to we tell the continuum and timeline of how our organization has come into this moment. And we think that there is sometimes often nothing more powerful than idea whose time has come. And we believe the idea for communities and schools, the idea of integrated student supports in every Title I school in the country has arrived. The problem was 50 years ago when our founder began this work. We weren't really ready to hear that because we were in a different place. In the late 70s as a country, you could see a scenario where schools just had to focus on academics. And what you began to see, if you believe an economist, economist out of Harvard named Raj Chetty, who's understood the dwindling American dream, which is, you know, after the decades after World War II, is a bit of a 90% chance that you would be doing better than your parents were doing if you followed them at the age of 27. So 90% chance that you would be making more money than your parents were at the age of 27. That they were. That's now a coin flip if you were born like I was in the mid-80s. And so we have seen that the challenges facing households schools has been really mounting. And these are pressures from economic inequality to just access to resources, to even just the separation of those who have and those who have not. And the results that you see that are on graduation rates, earnings over a lifetime. And my predecessor would have said that in 1992 or 1990 is when we saw the tipping point. So 51% of young people sitting in classrooms were living in poverty before that point. You might have been able to get away at a public education K12 system that didn't build integrated student supports, wraparound student services into the system. But now, two decades later, you cannot ignore this issue. It is mounting and we have to decide whether we can ignore it, tolerate the level of harm and pain this is creating in some communities and this disconnect and disparities that we're seeing in outcomes for many young people. And I think that's why we at this moment feel like the time has arrived that when our founder was building this work 50 years ago, we weren't ready to hear that The K through 12 public education system needed this system, but now it's not a nice to have. And you mentioned, are we knocking on the door For a time we were through the 90s and the early 2000s. Now we're being pulled in and we have to be very disciplined about how we think about growing to meet that demand because we don't have an army of 10,000 site coordinators standing by. But we do need to make sure that we're actually building towards a moment where we actually can meet the need.
- [61:02]
Jay Frost
And are you finding that the philanthropic resources are available for you even if government may be challenging at a time like this?
- [61:11]
Ray Saldana
Yeah. It is philanthropy that's playing one of the most significant roles in our ability to sketch out a vision for growth, expansion, and sustainability. I got two very important calls in 2021 and 2022 from National Philanthropy who was coming to help solve for the problem. I just described that there's a growing need inside schools and there's a pullback of what we believe is going to be possible at the federal level, at state governments and public funding. And one of them was an unrestricted anonymous email that I was hesitating to respond to from a McKinsey Scott representative where we got a call about the largest gift our organization would have ever received. And as somebody who's come from fundraising, $500 for a city council campaign on our best day, maybe $100,000 for a kip San Antonio. The other end of the call's voice said that we were going to make $133 million gift to communities and schools to ensure that we can help solve the problem that is only growing wider for the disparities between those who have opportunity and those who don't. That was one, and that's an entire story in itself. But the other was actually a really sophisticated design about how we think about growth saturation, targeting our addressable market. With the Ballmer Group and Steven Connie Ballmer, who, who lead the work of expanding work and economic mobility all across the country, really looked at an organization like CIS and said, what would it look like? And what's the kind of cost model? What's the minimum viable product? What do we know gets results with research, and how do we cost that out? And presenting to them an opportunity where we could grow in 2022 by 1,000 more schools over the next five years meant that they would get behind the work in a very significant way to bridge so that private funding would cede what ultimately public funding would come behind and sustain over the next several years. So the idea being, if they matched 50% of Mrs. Reyes all in costs for three years, could the public sector pick that up and by year four, sustain that? We're in the journey of that now and growing to a thousand schools behind that supports $165 million gain shift over five years.
- [63:24]
Jay Frost
And just in case someone listens to only a piece of this and hears that you are now, you know, looking at $165 million, that doesn't fund everything that you want to do, that you are doing, that you want to do, paint us a picture of what you want.
- [63:43]
Ray Saldana
We believe. And I remember our board chair, Elaine Wynn, when I was still on the board, asked the question, quite a provocative one of our CEO at the time, what would it cost to scale communities and schools to every title one school that needed it? And the number was quite staggering. It was a $7 billion annual spend. Well, you know, in the scheme of public education funding, which is somewhere closer to 7,800 billion dollars a year. The thinking behind what can private philanthropy do to sort of stem the tide of the ocean at 165 million, at 200 million. And you begin to talk about the scale at which you really try to scale impact at a population level, that it would really change the market. And what we believe we need to do is actually change the market of how schools are designing the supports inside their schools so that CIS is not seen as a nice to have or the way the model of our delivery is not seen as a nice to have. And we're ambivalent agnostic to whether CIS expands to all 60,000 Title 1 schools or that schools are just picking up the model and the delivery and the ingredients of how to do this work so that it can scale. And we think that state governments have a role to play in driving that outcome into the future. We think the federal government has a role in that. $7 billion year is what we think it costs. Because at the end of the day, our work is not an app, it's not an immunization, it's not a curriculum curriculum. It's our people. They're the work that are getting this work done every single day. And it is not programs that are transforming young people's lives, it's relationships. It's Mrs. Ray is committing to me over three years as I ignored her for three years and told her everything was fine. That is hard work. But that's what we think we need to do to meet the need of the moment.
- [65:25]
Jay Frost
I have to ask you about her. You've mentioned her so many times. She's obviously been a very important figure in your, in your life, but also in this work. When was the last time you talked to her? What does she have to say about what you're doing and what kind of conversations do you have about this kind of thing?
- [65:42]
Ray Saldana
Today Mrs. Reyes, who is now, she reminds me, Ray, it's not Mrs. Reyes. I got married since I was eight years high coordinator Ms. Claudia so Ms. Claudia and I exchanged texts a month ago. She is still a program. She's still with communities and schools. And it tells you how serious we are about this question of professionalizing the work that our site coordinators have a path to be a program director, which she is. She oversees now. 15 psych coordinators doing the work that she was doing for me. And it's quite an amazing thing to see an organization that invests in, again, the most important innovation that we have, which is the people. But she's still with the organization and every chance we see each other, we take a selfie and send it to the executive director of CIS of San Antonio. She was tickled to death when I told her that I was going to be the CEO of the organization that she helped me through. But she's still very much with the organization and it's people like her, Mr. Smith in Atlanta, a number of others who have just, you know, there's 5,000 Mrs. Reyes and Mr. Smiths all across the country.
- [66:48]
Jay Frost
Well, that's. That's it for this episode of the PM podcast. You can learn more about Ray's work at communitiesinschools.org Our thanks to our sponsor, Evertrue, the global leader in donor engagement and fundraising intelligence, helping nonprofits find, engage and inspire their supporters. Our producer is Jack Frost, and our theme music is Moving Out, Moving in by Jay Taylor, provided courtesy of Epidemic Sound. If you enjoyed the this conversation, be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And don't forget to check out our sister shows, Front Lines of Social Good and How to Raise, all part of the Philanthropy Mastermind series. Until next time. I'm Jay Frost. Thanks for joining me.