Senator Richard Polanco, Chairman CLCI congratulates all 2009 Polanco Fellows at graduation
By
Michael Castillo
Polanco Fellow, 2008-2009
As I look back upon my experience over the past year as a Polanco Fellow, I more clearly realize that I am here because I stand on the shoulder of giants. I shared this unique experience with two Fellows, who also became friends, Trini Solis and Ishmael Herrera. All three of us have been afforded an extraordinary opportunity because of those who came before us. Whether you feel it has been due to chance or destiny, the constant that remains is a helping hand that someone has offered. The Polanco Fellowship has provided all of us with profound guidance about where we are going in life. Let me begin with my experiences before I share Trini’s and Ismael’s stories.
The hand offered to me allowed me to be involved in two tremendous organizations, CalPERS and the California State Legislature.
My experience during the executive placement with the Corporate Governance Unit under the Global Equity Branch with CalPERS offered unique insight into how corporations function at the upper echelons of these organizations. I never really quite understood what the tickers that ran across the bottom of CNBC shows meant, or how a pension fund was set up and operated. I came into CalPERS with vague notions about our financial institutions. In time, I became more acquainted with the financial jargon that confuses many of us when we hear about economic news. Under the mentorship and guidance of Investment Officer Mary Morris, these concepts and types of exposure are a long way from my immigrant working class neighborhood, a neighborhood where owning stock, having a 401K, or any investment is almost impossible and/or foreign.
Having been able to make proxy vote recommendations, that is, making recommendations as to how CalPERS should vote at annual shareholder meetings for companies in which CalPERS had investments was exciting as I was also tasked with becoming familiar, with the then new financial program we now know as TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program). Such an opportunity would have been a distant thought in the neighborhood I grew up in and I feel privileged for being at CalPERS during one of the most historic economic times in my generation.
The Polanco Fellowship allowed me to pursue one of my long time goals, and that is to help represent the people of Los Angeles. My legislative placement, in the office of Assembly Member Price, now Senator Price, was a rewarding experience. Since my undergraduate career began at UC Davis, I always wanted to work inside our state capital. I have made it my goal to learn something everyday both on the policy side and political side. Being exposed first-hand to how our public policy becomes realized is an experience that cannot be duplicated anywhere.
I have seen how a constituent issue can develop into legislation. When we think of change we think of notions of prosperity, however, many outside the capital community do not fully understand what the legislative process entails. Being able to explain that process or issue to a constituent and provide context has been a gratifying experience, especially when it came to the issue of our state budget this year, because we can, at times, forget that such information can spur civic engagement, which in the case of the Latino community, is becoming exponentially important. In that spirit, I have been able to staff AB 106, which would expend avenues of voter registration in California.
I should also say that all three of us also benefited from one more special element in the Polanco Fellowship. We each were able to attend the training called “Foundations of Leadership” at the world-renowned Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) in La Jolla. This was an amazing experience. You learn at a world-class institute what your leadership strengths and weaknesses are and how to make them work for you in the real world environment. The Polanco Fellows who attend these intense trainings are usually the youngest in the groups. We’re in the training with middle-management professionals from all over the world. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything and I will always look back on it as a resource in terms of how to lead teams.
I now want to move on to Trini’s story. She is the daughter of migrant farm workers who have worked in Central California for the last 30 years. Throughout her childhood, resources were scarce for her family of eight. Health care was always a financial stress. Her family's situation caused Trini to reflect deeply on the lack of health care access in underserved communities and it fueled her desire to become a physician. She worked towards it with a strong work ethic and an unwavering determination and was rewarded when she received a full scholarship to attend Stanford University. After graduating from Stanford, Trini applied for and was accepted to the 2008-2009 Polanco Fellowship.
For the first part of the fellowship, she was placed in the California Department of Public Health. Specifically, she worked in the Cancer Control Branch under the direction of the branch chief Dr. Neal Kohatsu, who was past president of the American College of Preventive Medicine. One of her main projects was the implementation plan for Senate Bill 441, which was a bill that was signed by Governor Schwarzenegger in 2008. SB 441 requires that all vending machines on state property have 35% of the machine’s total contents meet accepted nutritional guidelines. While developing the implementation plan for SB 441, it became clear to Trini how crucial it is to develop relationships with other departments and programs in order to successfully implement a piece of legislation that could dramatically improve the health of so many people.
For the second component of the fellowship, Trini became a legislative aide for Assemblymember V. Manuel Perez. He represents California's District 80, which is the region located in the southeastern part of the state-that borders Arizona and Mexico. The area has the highest unemployment rate in California. One of her duties included staffing Assemblyman Perez for the Assembly Health Committee. In this role, Trini became informed about the health policies that are being proposed in the legislature. She was the office’s chief health liaison and analyzed the implications that various health policies would have on the state. She also represented Assemblyman Perez in all interactions with other lobbyists, legislators, and health agency staff members.
She staffed four bills. One of those bills included Assemblyman Perez’s major health bill- which is AB 1201 which mandates health insurance plans to fully reimburse physicians for their administration of immunizations. Many pediatricians have been absorbing such costs because they don’t want to pass it on to their patients, but primary care physicians are at the breaking point.
According to Trini, her participation in the Polanco Fellowship has been instrumental in her goal of becoming a culturally sensitive physician leader that will not only treat underserved patients, but who will also advocate on their behalf through public health policy. She was accepted to the UC San Francisco Medical School and is now attending classes there.
For Ismael, the Polanco Fellowship experience has allowed him to grow both professionally and personally. On the professional side, he came to understand the expectations, nuances, and politics of working in the political realm. On the personal side, he liked to note that he fully embraced his integrity, honesty, and appreciation of genuinely good human beings. This experience has taught Ismael that one must not only carry keen eyes and ears, but an open mind and heart as well.
Ismael served his agency placement in the Department of Education. His mentor was Dr. Anthony Monreal, a leader in helping to set statewide educational policy. As someone who earned a Master’s Degree in Education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, serving in a state agency dedicated to improving education for the state’s children was a dream fulfilled for Ismael.
He also learned that policy-oriented experiences and personal growth take place not only in offices and the hallways but beyond during informal occasions. One of his most memorable experiences was playing basketball with Legislators at the California Highway Patrol Academy. He looks back on those experiences on the court during his agency placement as fun but also as a bonding experience with his co-workers and actual elected officials.
Ismael says that he really enjoyed be part of the legislative process over the course of the fellowship. He was placed in Assemblymember Jose Solorio’s office and he had the chance to witness something move from an idea to potential law. As Ismael often says, that was a remarkable experience.
There is one thing that Ismael says he will never forget: it’s that relationships are key. He witnessed time and time again that folks are getting through life not only by what they know, but whom they’ve come to know and build solid relationships with over time.
For our community service project, we desired to play a mentorship role to local high school students. We chose to volunteer at Sacramento High School because of the school’s rich history in the area and because we deeply valued their mission statement. Specifically, Sacramento High School is located in the heart of Oak Park, an inner city Sacramento community. Founded in 1856, Sacramento High School is the second oldest public high school west of the Mississippi River and is considered to be a community landmark. Many of the students attending Sacramento High School come from disadvantaged backgrounds and they are often the first in their families to pursue college. A main component of Sacramento High School’s mission statement is to encourage the students to pursue community service, which is a value that we further wanted to instill in the students.
At the outset of the community service project, we found it difficult to connect with the students because many of them had vague notions of what the college application process entailed. We decided that during the first couple weeks, we would concentrate on telling them about our experiences of growing up in underserved neighborhoods. We shared with them our struggles of how we were the first in our families to leave for college and what we did to even get there. We realized that our stories began to resonate with them as they began to engage us with more personal questions and the discussions became longer. When we talked about our life stories we also combined our classes in an effort to expose them to different background experiences. After gaining the students’ trust, we gradually began to get into the crux of the application process. In doing so we still felt that we were not driving the point home. In response, we began to talk about the application and scholarship process in such a way as to provide them with perspective.
Once we felt that they were more engaged, we asked for them to request their grades for the purposes of helping them see where they stood in the A-G requirements to apply for the University of California schools. We made another interesting observation, as they would reply “Our counselors do that for us, so we should be ok.” The Fellows could have just left it at that and deferred this responsibility to the counselors; however, we felt that our discussions with them should make them feel accountable for knowing where they stood in fulfilling these requirements. After talking with their teachers, we were able to have them get their grades and went over the requirements with them. We drove the point of having them be responsible for mapping their progress, because many did not know where they stood.
Although time was limited with the students, we saw them gain a genuine interest in researching universities, scholarships, summer academic programs, and opportunities for themselves. The students became more accountable for their educational plans after high school. Having been placed with freshman and sophomore high school students gave us, and them, an opportunity to see education in a different light. The fact that these underclass students still had two years to go in high school gave the Fellows more time to have an influence on the students and their future plans.
For us, we saw that providing students with information was not enough. They had to understand education in a context in which they had never been exposed to (i.e. relating education to their lives now). The sooner the Fellows could plant the seeds of education’s importance, the sooner we could help nourish the plant’s growth. In the end, we feel good about our service as it humbled us given our insulation in the Capital. We thank historic Sacramento High School for their hospitality and collaboration!
Our lives will never be the same after this year. We came together as strangers and over the course of a year became part of a family. Ishmael, Trini and I are so appreciative to have been blessed by Senator Richard Polanco and the CLCI Board of Directors as well as Max Benavidez and Lisa Baca-Sigala for supporting us along the way as we continue to experience our journey in life. We are now part of the elite group of 30 young men and women who have come before us and take our places as the 31, 32 and 33 Polanco Fellow Alumni. What the future brings for all of us will be a tremendous legacy of being the change agents in our own communities and improving the lives others.
