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Richard is the CEO of Marin Promise Partnership, a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, an Ascend Fellow at the Aspen Institute, and a member of the StriveTogether Board of Directors. He is committed to economic mobility strategies led by backbone agencies at the neighborhood level with schools and government.

He is writing a book about the power of place in the cradle-to-career field, first inspired by his 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 small business lending and community ownership of real estate grew. He was also an advisor to the Promise City initiative, which is expanding this Promise Neighborhood approach to multiple communities in San Francisco. He helped to raise over $20 million for San Francisco’s Mission District, and is a frequent speaker at conferences across the country.

 

Richard focuses on the cradle-to-career field because he grew up in deep poverty and dropped out of high school, and this work is a healing journey for him. Richard’s great-grandparents were Yaqui, the indigenous people of northern Mexico; they came to the Bay Area after fighting in the Mexican Revolution. His parents worked as farm laborers throughout California and came of age during the Chicano Movement. They laid the foundation for him to earn a bachelor’s and master’s in Public Policy from UC Berkeley. He’s accompanied on this journey by his urban planner wife, five sons, and their rescue pit bull.