More and more of America’s school children are Latino — 25 percent nationwide and growing fast. But when those kids get to class, few of the adults around them share their heritage. At public schools, Latinos account for just 8 percent of teachers and administrators, 6 percent of principals, and 8 percent of board members at education-related nonprofits.
Amanda Fernandez is working hard to change those statistics.
Fernandez leads Latinos for Education, a small but ambitious nonprofit dedicated to increasing the ranks of Latinos in leadership positions in the education sector. As co-founder and CEO, she has won support from heavyweights in the grant-making world, including the Walton Family Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. In the four years since the group’s founding, it has raised $5 million and has increased its membership to 2,800 Latino leaders, a network it expects to double over the next few years.
The importance of education was instilled early by Fernandez’s parents, who emigrated from Cuba several years before she was born. Growing up, she says, she was aware of her parents’ struggles to navigate an unfamiliar culture. Later in life, she had trouble finding nonprofits focused on promoting Latino leadership and role models in schools.
“We have a talent gap in Latino educators and leaders, and we need to focus on that,” she says. “It is very important for students to see teachers and educators who look like them.”
Yet changing education wasn’t always Fernandez’s goal.
The path that led her to the nonprofit world started in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Back in 2001 she was working at Deloitte, a consulting firm, as a specialist in pharmaceutical mergers and acquisitions, in an office not far from the World Trade Center. In the months following the attack, she continued her daily commute to the job, but it left her emotionally empty.
“There was this awful smell of death that would never leave me,” she recalls. “It was a smell that became ingrained in me, and which said, You’ve got to do something else.”
‘We Are Unapologetic’
One of Latinos for Education’s guiding principles is that members’ identity is a source of strength in their work. “We are unapologetic about who we are and how our identity shapes our perspective,” its website states. “We value authenticity, and we see our experiences and histories as a source of pride.”
The group builds on this idea in its two flagship programs, which operate in Boston and Houston. The Aspiring Latino Leader Fellowship provides development for mid-level education leaders through career planning and identity-based leadership development. The Latino Board Fellowship provides governance training matched to boards of directors of charter schools and other education nonprofits that wouldn’t otherwise have any Latinos in top roles.
Through the two programs, the group develops, places, and connects Latino education leaders. Since the board fellowships began, in 2017, there have been three cohorts in Boston and one in Houston. To date, 19 fellows have been placed on boards in Boston and seven in Houston. Several more are expected to matriculate in the next few months.
Latinos for Education started in Boston and expanded to Houston in 2018, primarily because of the large numbers of Latinos in the state and region, the gap in Latino leadership in Houston, and the philanthropic base that could support the group’s work.
Jorge Ochoa was a part of the inaugural group of the Aspiring Latino Leaders Fellowship in 2017. The program, he says, “has pushed me to think of my own leadership and the doors that are open for me to walk through.”
Since completing the fellowship, Ochoa went from his role in college counseling at KIPP Massachusetts, part of a nonprofit network of charter schools, to become senior manager of College and Career Pathways at the KIPP Foundation, which works with charter schools nationwide. This summer he started his current job as senior director of college programming at Wonderful College Prep Academy, in California’s Central Valley.
Winning Over Grant Makers
Both Latinos for Education and Fernandez have high-profile admirers.
Margarita Florez, director of education at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, praises Fernandez’s leadership skills, saying she regularly contacts her for advice. “If I were to step out of this role, Amanda is someone I’d seek as a mentor. She embodies the notion of lifting as you climb.”
The initiative was so impressed with Fernandez’s work that it not only renewed Latinos for Education’s grant for 2019 but increased the size to $500,000. The news came as a surprise because Fernandez hadn’t been actively seeking money and had assumed that the grant wouldn’t be renewed. The grant renewal will allow her organization to continue increasing the size of its staff, which currently counts nine members. Since 2015, Chan Zuckerberg has provided it with $1 million in grants.
A friendly phone call between the two women was what led to the renewal. Fernandez was seeking Florez’s opinion about building a pipeline of Latino education entrepreneurs. That idea recently came to fruition. Last week, Latinos for Education hosted a pitch competition, in which Latino entrepreneurs working on early-stage ideas related to educational equity had the opportunity to win seed funding and gain exposure among funders, potential clients, and collaborators.
“By bringing me inside her work in that way, well, it allowed me to see that this is an opportunity that we could really support,” says Florez.
The news of the grant increase brought Fernandez to tears. She had been worried about the organization’s 2019 budget: “That eased a tremendous amount of stress.”
Latinos for Education — and Fernandez specifically — is working to cultivate relationships with individual donors. They still represent a small portion of its funding, just 2 to 3 percent, Fernandez estimates.
Finding and connecting with those individuals is “a lot of detective and sleuth work,” she says. “It takes longer than identifying the more prominent foundations that have the significant giving capacity.”
Just as the organization promotes leaning into identity as a crucial element of leadership among its members, Fernandez sees fundraising in much the same way.
She almost always starts conversations with new or prospective donors by sharing how her experiences as a Latina have shaped her. “I really emphasize how this piece of my identity is really critical to not only me but the shared experiences that I have with students and families, our fellows,” she says. “I make it a point to do that.”
Education Equals Power
Fernandez’s climb to the top of a growing national nonprofit has been a steep one.
Her parents immigrated to the United States from Cuba in 1963. They had no money, spoke almost no English, and settled in Grinnell, a small town in Iowa. Her father eventually earned a Ph.D. in Spanish at Western Illinois University and landed a teaching job there. His wife was employed on campus as an hourly food-service worker.
“So, you have my father as a professor at the same university where my mother was cutting lettuce in the kitchen,” Fernandez says. “It was later in life that I developed my own sense of what I saw as fairness and justice in the world.”
Many immigrants, she says, believe they can’t change the trajectory of their lives because of their lack of power in society. Deciding early on that education was the best way she could advance, she earned a journalism degree from Western Illinois and a master’s degree in education from Fordham University.
After 9/11, Fernandez started taking time to do the things in New York City that she’d never done before. She attended Broadway plays. She went to Lincoln Center to watch the ballet. “Life was too short to not do something that matters to me.”
She later joined the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit organization that provides strategy and management advice to nonprofits and philanthropists. While on an education project with the Latino civil-rights orgnization now called Unidos, she developed a deeper understanding of disparities in educational access for Latino children. When Fernandez moved to the Boston area, she became more involved in the local educational system. While today Latinos make up 42 percent of Boston’s public-school students, only 11 percent of teachers and very few senior leaders are Latino.
With that realization, Fernandez took a job at Teach for America, where she was responsible for engaging with Latino communities in the areas where corps members work; for the recruitment and development of Latino corps members, staff members, and alumni; and for building partnerships with other Latino-serving organizations.
She crisscrossed the country to visit schools in poor neighborhoods, from Compton, in Los Angeles County, to the Bronx, and saw the same story over and over: Most Latinos working in education didn’t know how to climb to positions of influence. In late 2014, she spoke with a good friend and fellow educator who also was eager to help fill the Latino leadership gap in education. The friend gave Fernandez the idea to co-found Latinos for Education. She did so in August 2015 with four other Latina leaders: JoAnn Gama, Susan Valverde, Lisette Nieves, and Tina Fernandez.
Start-Up Struggles
The challenge was formidable. Fernandez started with no money and no real plan. On top of that, her husband advised her that if the nonprofit group wasn’t off the ground — and financially viable — within six months, she’d need to find another job to help support their two children.
“It’s very lonely to be the founder of a start-up,” she says. “It’s hard to describe to a friend or family member or even a spouse all the things that you grapple with on a day-to-day basis.”
She applied for a $100,000 fellowship from the NewSchools Venture Fund, which supports public-education leaders, and when she received it, was able to start the group and hire her first employee.
Fundraising remains a constant struggle. A 2011 report from the Foundation Center and Hispanics in Philanthropy found that an average of 1.3 percent of the nation’s foundation grants made between 1999 and 2009 could be identified as benefiting Latinos.
Figuring out what foundations want can be tricky, she acknowledges. “Philanthropy tends to be in a perpetual state of reviewing strategies.”
Leaders of color often have a much harder time fundraising, says Gerald Chertavian, founder and CEO of Year Up, one of the largest programs for youth work-force development. He served on the board oft Roxbury Community College with Fernandez and is a donor to Latinos for Education. “They don’t typically have access to the many natural networks that others have access to,” he says.
Chertavian knows firsthand how difficult it is to start a nonprofit. He’s impressed by Fernandez’s collegial, generous approach to leadership. Even as she was building her own organization, he says, “she took the time to ask, ‘How can I help you guys?’ "
Despite the challenges she’s up against as leader of a start-up, Fernandez has big plans. Latinos for Education will conclude a three-year strategic-planning process this month, and she anticipates that it will begin considering its next region for expansion in 2020.
“I don’t have role models who look like me or who do what I do,” Fernandez says. But that feeling is an inspiration. She wants to be that role model for leaders who come after her. “Life is short,” she says, “and I’ve got to do something that matters to me.”
Eden Stiffman contributed to this article.
Correction: A previous version of this article said Fernandez received a $100,000 fellowship from the Pahara Institute instead of the NewSchools Venture Fund.
