Her Story
About Yesenia
I was always raised in service. I was born in Watts, Los Angeles, and my grandmother was the one who raised me. She always was giving back to the community, and I learned by example. I guess I'm her legacy right now. She was always involved with the church, with the city, even though she didn't speak English and she lived in the city for 50 years. She was always connected and helping others. I fell into teaching when I was in Colombia at a national school, the U.S. Embassy. I started teaching over there and fell in love with it, just working with people. I came back to the States and finished my education. I started teaching parent ed, ESL, and working with younger kids first. I went into alternative education because I saw the need so high. I would get frustrated because I saw parents parenting the way my biological mother would, and it was devastating to see that it was repeating again, and I wanted to change the cycles. I ended up getting the GED even though I went to school in Mexico for a year and Colombia for a year, because my credits weren't counted while I was out of the country. I was sent away to the other country, supposedly as punishment, because my biological mother was very abusive and couldn't have it together. That inspired me to change the cycles and to start helping in any way I could. When I started here at the continuation school, I started seeing a lot of recognizable behaviors that people were misidentifying as being disrespectful or rude, as opposed to that being a symptom to something deeper that was going on. This led me to go back to school to get my clinical component for clinical counseling. From there is when we started building our program, the principal and I, in regards to the school-based health center, getting partnerships to make sure we're supporting our kids and creating universal screeners and interventions so that we could be more proactive as opposed to being reactive to the behaviors and punitive measures. I kept saying these kids aren't ditching and they're not doing this arbitrarily - they need support and we need to figure out what's the core issue to this, and that's how we built our program.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Yesenia
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to my grandmother and her legacy. She was always giving back to the community, always involved with the church and the city, even though she didn't speak English and lived in the city for 50 years. She was always connected and helping others. I learned by example, and I guess I'm her legacy right now. That foundation of service she instilled in me is what drives everything I do.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice I give to new and up-and-coming mentees and facilitators is: Believe in the work, do the work, walk the walk. I don't want to see anybody who doesn't, you know, they're all talk. Make sure that you're doing the work for the right reasons. It shows when you're not authentic. Authenticity takes you a long way with the kids, parents, families, everybody around you. Nobody trusts somebody that they can't believe in, and they know they're not authentic.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Believe in yourself. Don't make yourself small for other people. When you're honest with yourself, you know what I mean? When you're not trying to be somebody else, and you don't have a facade going on, you're always gonna be believed in. Be persistent, don't believe the noise.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
The values most important to me are relationships, honesty, humility, and gratitude. All of that keeps me sane and keeps the fuel going. Right now I'm running on fumes, but I know it's all for good reasons. I think maybe I'm too altruistic in something, and I believe in what I'm doing, so the energy and the passion comes from the results. You do get results and the persistence.
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