Jessica Vega

I attribute my success to tenacity. I inherited it from my mom and my grandma and my dad. I grew up with very tenacious people who never deal with the words 'I can't' or 'no' very well. They don't. So I consider the tenacity, I'm just a very tenacious person. Do not tell me that I can't, because I will.

Travel. Travel and don't be afraid to say no when you don't want to do something. Do what's best for you, no matter what. I wish I would have told my younger self that. Travel as much as you can, because having culture in your life is never going to shape you into a bad person. Even if you travel to the next town over, you don't have to be rich. You can literally have just a couple of dollars to your name. You just need to get to know people and explore your surroundings. It'll change you. When my kids were little, I was a single mom at one point in my journey, and I remember one whole summer, we took the Metro North and we stopped at every single stop over one summer, and we learned something about that little town on each stop. You don't have to have money, you just need to explore.

The biggest challenge in my field right now is the employer and employee dynamic, specifically around gender equality. The biggest issue that my colleagues, partners, and even the Women's Resource Center have identified is that we can train people and give them the tools and education they need, but the problem is that business owners and employers in the hospitality field are posting jobs, and then when it's a woman versus a man applying, they change their demeanor and the pay rate depending on if you're a woman or man. It's horrible. My colleagues and I will literally go in and do ghost interviews to see this firsthand. The biggest challenge is making sure that our female students are getting proper pay and treatment for the job that they applied for, that they have all the skills and education for, the same as a man. I literally stayed with one very successful business in Houston for just about a week to see how they would handle my students. Not only did they change the pay rate, but they also were not supportive. They offered five dollars less than what it said on the ad. The biggest challenge is employers keeping their word about pay rate and treatment in the workplace. Over the next few months, my husband and I are literally going to go out of our way to meet with general managers across the city of Houston and business owners to light a little fire under them and let them know that we have eyes on them, to kind of hold them accountable to what they're putting on Indeed and LinkedIn.

My number one value would be hope, keeping hope. I feel very strongly that you have to err on the side of positivity, because the world is filled with so much negativity. Whether I'm with my team or someone I'm training, like if I get hired by a restaurant to retrain their staff, I don't go in carrying weight of anything negative. I'm going to come in with hope, with a non-judgmental attitude, and kindness. Kindness is the biggest thing, right? The biggest value. If one thing was left on my tombstone, I would have wanted to say that I was kind. That's all I want, that people who knew me knew that I was kind. And my kids were raised with a kind mom, and that they're kind people. The world is so hard. Every day is so hard. Just be kind to the best of your ability. Nobody's perfect, right? You can find some kindness each day to give to somebody else. That's all I want. That's the biggest value I want, is kindness.