I am the CEO of Marin Promise Partnership, Senior Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Ascend Fellow at the Aspen Institute, and member of the StriveTogether Board of Directors. I am committed to a national racial justice strategy that is led by community backbone agencies working at the neighborhood level with schools and government. I am writing a book about the power of place in the cradle-to-career field, based on my prior experience as Director of Mission Promise Neighborhood (MPN) in San Francisco. MPN is a collective impact effort that saw kinder-readiness and graduation rates increase dramatically while a network of neighborhood nonprofits strengthened their collaborative infrastructure, and while small business lending and community ownership of real estate grew. I was also the senior advisor to the Promise City initiative, which is expanding this Promise Neighborhood approach to multiple communities in San Francisco. I helped to raise over $20 million for San Francisco's Mission District, and I am a frequent speaker at conferences across the country. I focus on the cradle-to-career field because I grew up in deep poverty and dropped out of high school, and this work is a healing journey for me. My great-grandparents were Yaqui, the indigenous people of northern Mexico; they came to the Bay Area after fighting in the Mexican Revolution. My parents worked as farm laborers throughout California and came of age during the Chicano Movement. They laid the foundation for me to earn a B.A. and Master’s in Public Policy from UC Berkeley. I'm accompanied on this journey by my urban planner wife, five sons, and our rescue pit bull.