Ilsa Garcis

I never give up. I always tell myself I'm a hustler, but not in an ugly way. I always want to be present, and I want to leave an impact. When I was growing up, we used to make a line in December to get free toys because my dad was the only breadwinner in the house. My mom would never let us feel poor. We didn't know we were poor until we grew up. My mom would sew our clothes, we always had food on the table, we always had a toy in December. For my birthday, my dad would walk us over to the Burger King on Broadway, and they would give me the little crown from Burger King, and there was a swing set outside. He would buy us a burger, and that was my birthdays. I thought we were rich! Knowing that, I want these kids to understand that you're okay. It's going to be okay. It may look dim at their age, or they may not have everything that they want, but if I would have known that, I wouldn't have been so hard on myself or on my parents, who did the best. I think it stems from that growing up and being that way, that I now come back and try to help others. I love doing that. I really love to see the smile on people's faces. Giving back has always been very important to me.

Never sell out. I had a very nice older gentleman named Johnny Solis who told me this. I was in a situation where we needed money for NHPO, and a person was going to give it to us, but our name had to be everywhere. They didn't care about the mission or how many people were going to be there. They cared about splurging on the bar and wining and dining people. I didn't want to compromise. Johnny told me, 'Don't ever sell out. If it's not him, it's somebody else. Don't ever sell out or compromise your morals or the way that you think. Don't ever stay where you're not wanted, and never sell out. Because if it's not that person, another person will give it to you without all this fanfare.' I think about that and I told that to my board quite often. They come to me and say someone wants to donate money but they want to be front and center, they want the microphone, they want to talk about this and that, and I'm like, no, we cannot do that because we are bipartisan. We cannot sell ourselves to a certain party because that would be a conflict of interest. Me sharing that information with the board has helped us become stronger and be happy in what we do.

The biggest challenge is fundraising and sponsorships. For every person that you have a project, there's other nonprofits that are out there that are also needing the funds to help on their projects. So you start thinking, what projects are more important? What is more important to the person that we're all shopping the same sponsors? In the last board meeting, I told them we have to start venturing out to other networking events to find new people and incorporate them as new members to our organization, because nobody wants to come to a networking event and see the same people over and over. That's not networking, you're just meeting up like a family reunion. You're not doing what we said we were going to do, to introduce you to your newest contact, your newest career, or your newest whatever it may be. Because you saw this person already 4 times in a row at our networking event, that probably has been the biggest challenge, is actually going out of the ordinary or out of what feels safe to us and actually moving to the Memorial City side, moving over to another part of Houston where we've never been, and having to feel like, how about if we fail? Luckily for us, we have great marketing, great success, and we're able to help people, new people come in.

Loyalty is very much important, and having faith. I won't say that I want you to be a religious person or have a Bible in your hand or anything like that. But if you don't believe in a higher power, sometimes I feel like you will not have the empathy with the people that we are helping. We're in the business of helping others, whether it be in the professional networking, whether it be the food distributions, whether it be giving shoes out to kids and families. Some people that don't have faith or believe in a higher power are more like, whatever, this just happens to them because they put themselves in that position. I always guide myself with thanking God. Thank you, God, for another day. Thank you, God, for this phone call. Thank you, God, for placing me in places where I never thought I would be, for opening doors for me that I thought would never be open. In order for you to have empathy for those that you're helping, you have to believe in some sort of higher power. When it comes to loyalty, I'm very much a loyal person, and I believe that should be something very important when you work with a group, because you become family. We're together more than we are with our family sometimes. If you can trust a person that you're with for 8, 9, 10 hours, sometimes in the trenches of networking or in the trenches of food distribution, then who are you going to trust? If I don't trust you to give out, or if I ask you to do something and you get upset for whatever reason, then we're not gonna work out. I like to run everything where everybody's included, everybody feels wanted, and everybody feels like they have a part of what they're doing.