welcome everyone on behalf of stanford's graduate school of business school of education and law school we are honored that you can join us for this program we endeavor to create meaningful opportunities for stanford alumni to connect with one another around common areas of interest so we are proud to bring you this program that is a collaboration between our three schools before we begin please note that we have turned your audio off during the panel discussion so the speakers can maintain a co
nsistent flow of conversation however we encourage you to leave your video on during the program if you would like to submit questions to the speakers please utilize the chat function we will do our best to get to as many questions as possible during the q a portion though we may need to combine some of the questions if time is short following the panel discussion there will be an informal time to network with optional breakout rooms this portion of the program will not be recorded any and all a
re welcome to stay lastly diego with lala can only join us by audio today and we're very glad he is able to participate now without further ado i would like to turn the program over to our panel moderator julia moreira thank you i'm glad everybody's here welcome to this panel um i am julia moreira i am mba class of 1998. i work for grupo alpha in monterrey mexico i have been with them for 15 years and i run their corporate foundation we are actually a different foundation to most corporations in
mexico because we are a foundation that is an operating foundation we started off as a grant making foundation and in 2012 we underwent a strategic revaluation with mckinsey and designed a program that focuses on education and advancing education and we are operating this program we operate the schools our mission is to prove that social mobility can be attained in mexico through education which is something that doesn't happen much and we operate middle schools high school and then we have a p
rogram that has a scholarship program for college so we ensure that the kids that we work with get through all the the years of education and in this way we target mexico's problem of school dropout in high school which is big for mexico and we also focus on talent we actually focus on kids that are somehow talented and we focus on providing them the venue and the road to education um so i am very interested in education and i am joined today by four stanford alumni who are doing wonderful thing
s in education and they are truly making a difference in their different countries and i would like each of them to introduce themselves we will start first with ana paola pereira she is the executive director of instituto soho grande in brazil thank you julia hello everyone it's a pleasure to be here with you all and among these amazing panelists so thank you stanford for organizing this event and for inviting me as julia said i'm on apollo from brazil i am representing the school of education
where i completed a master's in international education policy analysis in 2019 and i'm currently the executive director of instituto soyo grange which is a brazilian non-profit organization with the mission to scale projects with evidence of high impact on brazilian public education since 2015 we have supported the expansion of a full-time high school program which is an alternative model to the the model privilege in brazil because normally students in brazilian public schools go to school for
four to five hours a day our model supports a school day of seven to nine hours and a whole different approach in terms of pedagogical model and curriculum and in terms of this work with the full-time high school model we work in partnerships with 19 of the 27 states in brazil to help them expand this program and better execute the school model in order to have the results and students learning uh portuguese math and all the other subjects that we we expect them to learn in k12 education to tel
l you about some of our numbers so far we support um 780 000 students in brazil uh today um we who are in more than 3 000 schools and represent more than 12 percent of brazilian high school enrollment nowadays our goal is to reach 50 of high school students by 2034 and the impact of the program we support is for example four times the impact of reducing the size of the classroom for those who work with education this is known as something that helps and 1.5 times the impact of studying with a go
od teacher instead of a weak one and also we have greater chances of going to college and higher average weight wage from students that graduate from our program it's a pleasure to be here and i'm excited to have this conversation tonight thank you anna i would like now to introduce uh diego he is a co-founder and the ceo of the latin leadership academy and he joins us from colombia um thank you julia and everett i'm so sorry that i i'm not turning my camera on and that i sound like this i'm rec
overing from surgery and you don't want to see me right now um but uh it's it's such a pleasure to be here um to talk about this topic in a multi-disciplinary panel uh it's really exciting uh i graduated from the gsb 2018 and season founded lala latin american leadership academy uh lal is a non-profit organization that seeks to promote sustainable and shared prosperity in latin america by developing a new generation of leaders the the inspiration behind lala came twofold one was me growing up in
peru and seeing all sorts of political environmental social economic problems and wondering how to tackle them like what what is the single point of highest leverage to start unraveling systemic problems countrywide and honestly i i didn't arrive at any good answer and then years later i worked at this incredible organization called african leadership academy ala i encourage everyone to look them up they were founded by two gs beers back in 2008 more or less and what really inspired me there wa
s that they were finding teenagers who already had an incredible sense of mission and purpose to solve the problems that they had grown up seeing in their communities and it was there that it clicked for me that perhaps the single highest leverage thing we could do to promote change at scale authentically sustainably in a continent was to find these young people and empower them to become the the best leaders they could be and what excites me about this panel is that part of the vision is not ju
st that they will become as a separate collection of leaders solving problems in separation but that they can come together kind of like how we're coming together here across disciplines across countries across uh the private public and social sector across the society spectrum to address the problems that plague latin america uh so that's that's the the quick summary of lala uh looking forward to the conversation with all of you thank you diego now i would like to introduce felipe neves he is t
he founder and the president of the constitutional law school project and a not-for-profit organization he runs aside from his day-to-day thank you julia so first of all i'm really really honored to be here and happy to share this panel with an amazing group of people my name is felipe navis i'm from sao paulo brazil i graduated from stanford law school while then program in 2019 and although i'm a lawyer working at cleary gossip with corporate and financial transactions working with public educ
ation represents a big part of my life i am the founder of constitutional law school project the biggest civic education non-profit organization in brazil i started giving constitutional lectures in a public school nearby my law firm at that time six years ago and nowadays we teach constitutional law civics and politics to more than 25 000 public school students in person every year we believe that in this way students understand the role and duties of our politicians the importance of clinches
voting and also now they understand their individual rights and guarantees as citizens so if they have a problem they can go after the right politician in order to demand improvements in their own communities and school and also we provide scholarships mentorship programs and help low-income students to find internships and jobs in areas mainly related to law i also recently launched a social ed tech called civics education we sell legal courses from top-tier brazilian lawyers and we use the rev
enue to fund scholarships to low-income students and we also produce free courses to public school teachers but happy to talk more about it later so again really happy to be here and feel free to ask me any questions thank you felipe i would like now to introduce our last panelist juan manuel gonzalez he is the ceo of ensena por mexico which is part of teach for all thank you julia and thank you felipe and about diego i'm very excited to be here i want to start by sharing that as everybody that
is here i love education and is my passion and even though it took me a while to completely dedicate myself full-time in the edu to the education sector uh is definitely what i love to do i've been part of in singapore mexico for the past two years and a half i graduated from the gsb in 2016 and at the same time i did a master's in education and the reason i went to the gsb is because i wanted to come back to mexico after extending 14 years in the united states to work in education and in partic
ular because i grew up in a lower middle class neighborhood of guadalajara where i started to see the differences that happen to a human being when you get good education i was able to see this personally when i will be in in the united states after going to good education going to texas a m getting a good job and getting scholarships and then coming back to guadalajara and seeing many of my cousins many of my friends been involved in crime and being involved in things not necessarily because th
ey they wanted to it was because they didn't have any other better choice so that's what opened my eyes and it was when i decided that i was going to go back to mexico and work in education and in particular in an organization that would focus on providing greater opportunities to mexicans no matter what was their zip code so that's how i ended up getting this executive job in singapore mexico i i i've been part of the organization as i say for the past two years and a half and what we do it is
recruit a talented professionals that will join a leadership program that is a full-time program for two years in which these professionals will be assigned to public schools and they will seek to achieve three three transformations the first one is the personal we want them to become the leaders that mexico and the education sector needs uh second is educational so they gotta make sure that they improve the opportunities academically and socially emotionally for their students and third sociall
y they gotta make sure that they work with the communities to make sure that they they create the collective leadership necessary to make the change we believe that the leadership that we need is already in the communities we just need to spark it and it's part of what these leaders do we call them professionals in senior for mexico we have been in mexico operating for the past eight years we have impacted more than 100 000 students in 10 different states of the country 474 fellows have complete
d the two two-year leadership program and currently we have 243 fellows and i love it i love what i do it's definitely something that i will say i spent six years in consulting and my current job is way harder than any other project that i did in consulting but it is this passion and love and change that i'm seeing in this community that keeps keeps me going and thank you for having me thank you to the four of us uh the four of you sorry for this um background and as you can see everybody is try
ing to target education and advance education in latin america through different areas teachers civic education a little bit of everything so i wanted to open up and ask you guys what you for think are the key challenges that latin america is facing in this area i think we all agree that it is a big issue and the inequality of education needs to be pushed forward and we all are participating in that but how do you see just on a broader perspective what the key challenges are and do you think tha
t some of those have changed because because of the pandemic any thoughts on that a lot of thoughts on that so so for me for me is i think it's important to explain the context of the brazilian education so brazil has one of the biggest disparities between the reaches five percent and the poorest five percent in brazil the five percent most vulnerable have the same human development index as this the five percent most vulnerable in india but also in brazil the richest five percent have the same
human developed index as the richest five percent in europe creating this huge disparity in brazil and for me the main reason is the credit quality of public education so in sao paulo we have the same gdp for capitalized chile but why don't we have the same education indicators as chile as well so first only the state of sao paulo is where i live we have more than 5 000 public schools and more than 3 million students so to give you more color uh the biggest uh educational district in the us is n
ew york and they have 1 000 schools and 1 million students so we have a lot of schools to handle in the same district and because we have such a large educational system we lack of individualized training and support for our teachers and students and therefore sometimes we even have biology teachers teaching physics portuguese math so because of that public school students they do not receive the proper education that they should not be able to prepare for college admission tests or for professi
onal opportunities so uh they don't see a future in public education and because of that for me long story short we are likely to have more unqualified professional school-wise and we will increase the offer of those professionals but not the demand which will reflect their salaries which will be lower and that's one of the reasons for me the main reasons of our social and economic disparities in brazil and i believe that's what we do here at the ngo that in order to change our country our socie
ty our neighborhood the civil society like regular people companies at least for now they need to help the government to prepare our students and give them more educational opportunities so i think that i can relate to juan and diego as well we cannot give like a lot of opportunities but if we focus in like giving to one student that's really good he can serve as a role model for the entire school community neighborhood and this one student can give the example by changing his or her life throug
h education and we are trying to create leaders in those low-income communities they can show the way for a better future for education so that was my main perspective of brazil and what we do here as a civil society to help to to improve our education system thanks felipe uh i would like to add in mexico in particular i'm gonna talk about it in in two ways the first one is from the reforms from the political aspect the policy is that i think is the thing with mexico is that every new administra
tion that comes into power creates a new reform creates a new policy so we forget that education in order for us to see a change it require it requires a long time and if we're continuously changing every six years in in the case of mexico every reform that we we create we're not going to see the result that we're expecting so that is one of the things that i think is one of the challenges in mexico i would like that education was not was not a political case or was not seen as an opportunity fo
r politicians to show something and we will create reforms thinking in many years ahead and avoiding to change it every six years the other aspect is i think that is that i has affected mexico is for many years uh teachers have not received the respect that they deserve they they do a very hard job and it's easier for us to criticize uh because of unions because of many things that we see on tv we start criticizing and put the blame on the um of the effects of education on the teachers and in re
ality the the majority of the teachers in the case of mexico are doing a great job want to do great things for our students unfortunately they're not receiving the preparation the training all that they need to make this change happen so that is the other aspect that i see so like i definitely see those two main challenges the political aspect and the uh not recognizing and being respected respecting teachers for the value that they contribute to society i agree with both juan and felipe and to
add uh on starting transfer the second second part of your question julia uh all of these challenges are being greatly enhanced by the pandemic so something that felipe talked about which is a big inequality is something that is going to be uh enhanced but a pandemic so we are seeing two main impacts that are coming from uh the pandemic the main one will probably be uh dropbox rates which are already really high in latin and they will be higher for the most vulnerable students because of the eff
ect that the pandemic poses in families financial situation and everything a lot of those students are already not as engaged so also because of that we are expecting a really big uh increase in drop-off rates and this is going to be uh very difficult to compensate for afterwards and with that we are already also expecting a big learning loss because schools have been closed for a long time in brazil particularly it's almost a year now it's longer than most countries in the world unfortunately a
nd a lot of a lot of studies have already been published uh in in proving that the learning laws will be huge for uh poor students because they don't have as many help and support from their families at home to continue studying and learning while they are there in remote learning or not even remote learning at all while the richer students and families they have a lot of different kinds of support and sources of support and they will still face some learning laws but not as much so all of the i
mpacts that we are talking about there are already big challenges in the time for education will be unfortunately enhanced with the pandemic and we need to reinforce our work as civil society as nonprofits to be able to compensate that in the months that are coming um i'll try to add thoughts uh that don't duplicate what the other said because i agree with everything you all said so just for some context setting in case uh anyone to be honest not familiar with these horrible sets uh latin americ
a is the region with the highest income inequality in the world and if you look at the link i'm basically in the chat well there's all the data on two latin american countries but we're also a region with no social mobility so what what does social mobility or what do pathways to social mobility look like for someone that is starting in sectors uh d or e or s or estratos or nados in colombia and so on uh usually people are told the old story of work hard study hard and you know you will reach op
portunities unfortunately most of those pathways are only really open for kids again thinking about the lowest income kids uh if you're a math genius a science genius right if you win the the science olympiads you get a really high equivalent to the sat in your country whether it is a vestibular eclipse and so on and then hopefully you get into a university uh with a scholarship but then most of those kids have had to spend most of their uh formative years really focusing on a few quantitative c
ourses so by the time they get to these universities they're really under-invested in social-emotional skills plus they're now usually far from home maybe they grew up in a province now they're in a big city maybe they're darker skinned uh and i'm i suspect that in all of our countries uh there's deep racism and elitism so it's not surprising that for many of those kids um trying to access opportunities that way is broken uh actually uh someone in the audience saw him here uh the deludion starte
d a non-profit called mentors for you colombia because he he saw that once the top of these kids get jobs they're underpaid because again they're the dark skinned kid from a province who doesn't have the communication skills does they have the social emotional skills because they over invested their whole lives in the one trick that could get them access opportunities in our countries so that pathway is broken for most people the other two are uh some combination of informality and crime and you
've seen it in your countries as well and unfortunately those pathways are much more effective for many of these kids what is frustrating and i saw someone else in the audience uh antonio pudol that is starting a cool or has already started a cool ed tech company there are tools out there for many of these kids to reach a good education right like they don't have to play the same games to enter these very few educational opportunities but the problem is access to internet which like napoli said
is is going to make this harder for kids but the other problem that we think about is uh motivation right like if you're one of these kids and you grew up in one of these uh favelas communists rural areas you're dark skinned you're low-income in a latin american country where's the motivation for you to try hard if uh if most of these pathways opportunity are broken so felipe you mentioned in passing i love the comments of how important it is that we make a few more pathways open to more diverse
kids from our countries so that others who grew up like them will become inspired and see that it is possible to escape poverty and to do something with your life that doesn't have to just be uh you know be a math genius and then study engineering so i i wanted to bring that up because most of you the audience are not i believe in education i see i think there's a lot of lawyers and business leaders so uh so some of us are trying to create these new educational pathways focus more on social emo
tional learning try to spot hidden gems in low-income sectors of latin america but then are you on the employer side also taking risks partnering with organizations like ours to spot those uh more diverse kids who don't have the traditional markers of success of potential because each one of them that you give an opportunity can become a hero to an entire community so i wanted to leave you all with that that's slight provocation can i add something because it definitely was a provocation and i l
ove the perspective that diego brings of the equity aspect because in latin america we have for many for many years we thought that what we needed in education is it was equality but we don't need that we need to get into equity we need to give resources to more resources to those students that needed the most and not the same to everybody we need to understand that there are people that were already behind when they were born because they were born in that community so we need to figure out way
s to create opportunities for this and also like in in my case in my party in my particular case i believe that my success was by accident so we need to crea design it we need to make sure that success is designed for every individual in this society and that is not an accident so like we definitely need to change the models and it's it's a systemic problem it's not just education we need to look at it from the private public civil society sector to change it otherwise it's going to continue the
same and to change something that is systemic requires all of us working in synergy and is very hard to achieve but i'm sure that if many of us were to sit down and think how we can bring our perspective or what we know and how do we make sure that we change an entire system on how it works like for example in mexico i don't think it is even enough to get a good education what matters is your network you might be like diego was saying you might be the best students from a public university but
the average student from a private university is gonna get a better opportunity so it's not just necessarily about giving a merit it's about changing our perspectives and the way of thinking and like i say making sure that success happens by design and not by accident i actually want to echo that on juan manuel because in the program that we have we we start with our students in seventh grade for underprivileged areas and when we started the program we met asked them what their vision was for th
e future what they wanted to do with the future and their aspirations were all on the basic uh the bottom part of the maslow pyramid they wanted to buy a house for their mom because they didn't have a house or they wanted to put doors between the but they never aspired to become and if you ask seventh graders which is our students in higher income areas in mexico they have other kinds of aspirations so i think it's very important like juan manuel said to be able to prove and then the the next ge
neration actually changes those aspirations and sees that they can attain that through education um following up on juan manuel uh you said that there we are here and that the whole every area of um needs to come together the businesses the government us working in education and non-for-profits and taking on that um i wanted to ask what you guys thought were the major skills that we needed in this area where we work in the not-for-profit in the education sector because in my experience i used to
work for bain before like an apollo and there is so many things that i think we bring over to this sector and so many things that we can capitalize from being in the private sector first so what do you think is the skills that we need to be successful in this area i can start by saying uh it's it's it's interesting to answer uh this question because i actually believe that we need the same skills that any uh for-profit organization we also need like stands for trained talented people to make th
ings happen and and this was a decision that in the case of sonia granger we made from day one like we want to have an interesting and attractive career to be able to bring people that would go to bain and other organizations to work and that's how uh our that's a big part of of our secret sauce uh to get to the the 800 000 students and everything else but uh trying to to give a more specific answer i think um in general uh fundraising skills are important because in the nonprofit sector you gen
erally do not have your own income you do not sell products or services normally so fundraising and all that comes with that relationship interpersonal skills and networking and everything is very important um in our case it's not exactly fundraising but we do need to convince uh public servants governors uh state secretaries of education that this program is worth their investment in their time so we also need to have like from a very quantitative analysis uh skill set in order to be able to ga
ther evidence that what we're doing really works and has an impact from their communication and advocacy so we can generate knowledge around what we're doing engage people and convince them and to implement this program in their school networks and after that a very hard implementation skill set because we need to be there with them helping them navigate the complexity of uh rebuilding schools uh changing uh students from one school to another because when you extend your time in school from fiv
e to nine you lose your school capacity by half so we need to reorganize the whole network and a lot that comes with that teacher training for the new curriculum and everything of course we don't have one profile that has all of the skills but i'm just like giving some examples of how we see this in sao grande and it is not easy to recruit for a non-profit as the for-profit sector so this is something that is a an important challenge and uh when we talk about how anyone here can help i think uh
supporting these organizations in this way uh recommending talent or uh as mentors uh helping people see that working in the sector can be as exciting as the for-profit sector we just saw juan manuel saying how much he loves what he does i do too and we can see that everyone here does so i think this is a very very uh important issue for everyone in our organizations i may add i mean i agree with everything but for me you have to be really creative especially when you deal with lack of resources
so i was running the ngo for two years with no budget at all i was asking for you know goods and and services directly from the company so hey can you give me a scholarship can you give me laptops and that's it and uh you need to be creative i mean we we launched our ad tech and we realized that people will be willing to spend money if they knew that part of this money will be used to fund scholarships so that's an idea that we realize that will be good and it's being validated as we speak now
and also i think that you need to bring people inside the problem so just asking for donations is not enough if you ask for donations but also if you let people join the solution like by giving mentorship by talking to the students they realize the impact and you know they bring more people in and like a psycho and a bug that bites you and you get addicted so that that's that's something that i that i learned during this short period of time working with education i i agree with felipe and apoll
o and in particular with the leadership and interpersonal skills as the ceo or executive director of a non-profit you're gonna be dealing with people from all kinds from very wealthy individuals to people that have very limited resources in the community to teachers to politicians so you gotta be able to know how to behave and how to be empathetic to each of these individuals and find ways to create genuine relationships with each of these individuals if they notice that you're trying to get som
ething out of them they can detect it very easily so you have to do your homework and understand that you need to bring this empathy and identify what connects you because i'm sure all of us can connect with any person that in the world but we need to identify that so definitely interpersonal skills and also with the team so you're gonna have to motivate a team if you really are attracted talented people unfortunately we don't have the budget to pay them the same money that mckinsey bain or any
consultant or any banking that will pay them so you have to think of creative ways to create intrinsic motivation in the employees that you're attracting to keep them because money is not going to be your main power so you have to make sure that in this leadership skills in this uh culture that you're setting for the entire organization there is something that keeps them there in a vision so if you hire someone because you're offering a good salary in a non-profit uh more likely someone in the p
rivate sector can offer them a better salary because is it is known that unfortunately we don't have the resources to pay them enough so definitely that is one of the things like and the last thing like agreeing with felipe doing being very creative and innovative you have to do more with less this goes in every aspect uh your donors are gonna be questioning every single item and making sure that you use it in efficiently and there is nothing wrong with that but like i would like to just mention
a side comment about this that donors uh should get to know the leadership team of the nonprofit so they can trust that they're gonna be doing good things for the resources and should give us more freedom to do what we need to do with that money instead of restricting it for something because when you restrict a resource you're limiting the opportunity for this non-profit to be creative and find solutions to grow uh faster so i will i i will say those are the three things that that i will say a
bout what you need to have um i'll i'll add one more dimension i was going to see what what hormones is talking about like the the much more multifaceted nuanced leadership challenges for sure what i'll add is how you have to combine multiple forms of knowing because at the end of the day you're doing this work because you're trying to solve some complex systemic problem that hasn't been solved ever at least in this particular geography so just uh so i think several of us are former consultants
uh so just coming with your consultant toolkit and being like all right 80 20 bc not enough because then you're like well let me learn about the history of this place and now let's also look at the best research locally and in the rest of the world let's say about education cognitive science uh social mobility trust building movement building and so on then you also have to do your your whole lead startup design thinking prototyping so you also have to bring that into the mix and you have to do
this all on the fly with no budget while you're often not in person with your team because often almost by design the funds are not where the problems are so ideally you want to be you want your team to be closer to the problem but that's not where the funds will be so uh imagine the additional challenge of leading an organization in the team and like kwame was saying motivating them intrinsically because you don't have money when you're also not there in person so i think it's just a really int
eresting accelerated way to develop yourself and face all sorts of challenges both personal interpersonal intellectual and so many more but i think it's totally worth it so following up on totally worth it um i think the the five of us are committed to what we're doing to the non-profit area in education and i think you can see from the from the four panelists how passionate they are about what they're doing and how they found it how would you guys um discuss how you came to this path and how wo
uld you say that um if you could turn back time and say i would have gotten on this path before i should have spent so many years at pain i really this was the path that i wanted and maybe more a little bit on the line of felipe who is doing um doing it on the side to say um how do you actually find where you should where you should contribute how you should contribute and how you will find this motivation to move forward well so for me it was something kind of natural so my mom single parent wo
rking two jobs she was a teacher so i just saw you know the struggle and her willingness to give me a better future so when i graduated i you know just decided to do the same thing before i have kids and that's important because once i have kids i don't know if i'm gonna have that much free time so i'm you know i'm doing as i can so so for me for example i'm a lawyer i know about a little bit about you know law constitutional law and you know individual rights and guarantees so what i can say is
that if you are in business finance health i mean you have something that you can share and you don't need to build an organization in order to start sharing something or helping others you can just you know start doing it as i said i started going to a public school nearby my law firm at that time and after you know two weeks i went to the second public school and then after two years i incorporated an organization and now we have more than 120 volunteer lawyers working and i mean the answer i
s kind of you know cliche but it makes me really happy to work with public education and students that are willing to you know learn and listen to you and change their lives and when you see for example we have a student now that her goal is was to go to harvard i changed her mind to go to stanford now so and and for her like you know three years ago she told me that her goal was to work as a telemarketing operator and that that was it so if you create this kind of you know change of perspective
yeah i mean there's no words that i can just describe because it just makes me happy and makes me keep doing it and that that's it for me again i have mentioned already a little bit that i i got experienced this social mobility of getting to go to stanford after being born in a lower middle class neighborhood in mexico but my true inspiration was my mother my mother is from michoacan from a rural community in michoacan where she didn't have the opportunity to attend to school she actually never
had the opportunity to learn to read and write she has eight children so i was and since i was a child i always noticed this contrast of what i was able to get because i was having a good education versus what my mother had all because i was born in a city with more opportunities and she was born in a rural community so i started to notice this and to be honest at the beginning when i was a child i wanted to be rich i wanted to get out of poverty i wanted to get a nice house and not drive a nic
e car and i started my car reading consulting but luckily i realized soon enough that i needed to do something to change the life of many children in mexico the way that education changed my life so like how could i do that so uh since i was in college i started to work in particular i was in texas a m working with immigrant students that did not know any better they were coming from these rural communities from mexico to the united states and didn't know what was available for them so i i remem
ber be happy that they will make me when i will be teaching them and seeing when they will see more opportunities open to them and i started my career at the lloyd that didn't change but it it took me two years in the lord to realize that i wasn't happy but just making money myself and that i needed to go back in the education sector full-time so i created this plan in which i was gonna come back to mexico and i was gonna come back to do something great for education that i couldn't just come ba
ck to work in the private sector that i needed to work in an education organization that was gonna do something so it took me six years to get to this plan but luckily i did it within that time and and i love it and i'm happy that i'm doing it but i would like to advise anybody here that is thinking about supporting a social problem to do it sooner than later the world is changing very quickly we're seeing bigger problems with climate change bigger bigger problems with gaps in things or race in
terms of society in terms of that if we don't invest and put the best or and the most talented people in to solve this problem i don't know what's going to happen to this world in 10 15 years so i urge you not to wait to if you have this part give up that consulting job you're gonna survive uh you're gonna love it and it's gonna change your life forever and you're gonna change the lives of thousands if not millions of people in my case i have some similarities to the other story so i also have a
personal trajectory that was very impacted by education so i studied in a public system and most of my k-12 education but for high school i went to a private school and i saw the difference in the quality of education in the types of opportunities i had in that school versus the my colleagues that stayed in the public school still i decided for college that i was going to study mechanical mechanical engineering um and i was thinking of a specific type of career but then i engaged in a extracurr
icular activity uh in which we did consulting projects in our areas of expertise but it was a very transformative uh opportunity for me and our mission as an organization i i had the opportunity to lead the organization that organizes the the local uh junior enterprises throughout brazil and our mission was to develop leaders to transform brazil and then i was very excited to join the two things the education need that we have in brazil with this sense of duty i think and and i decided to start
working in education right out of college so i did this always even when i was a pain so i started in a nat tech adaptive learning attack in brazil it's called geeky it's founded by a stanford alum also and one thing you can add here is uh i knew it was education but i didn't know exactly what what in education for profit not for profit and technology or not and everything so i did start trying with for-profit technology uh we did adaptive learning uh to schools throughout brazil private and pub
lic and i realized why i was managing projects for like state education departments in brazil for geeky that we were solving a very sophisticated issue uh and problem while students were not having class because someone forgot to pay the bill students were not in class because uh teachers were not showing up for class every day or they were not in class because food did not arrive so the problems are a lot more basic and with that i decided to change my career from technology for education to ed
ucation management i think there's a real opportunity in improving management in state education departments municipal education departments and then that's when i went to bed and company because bain used to have a lot of uh interesting projects for states in brazil in which they help with strategic planning management and everything and i had the opportunity to work as a bank consultant choice to put some grants that's how i came uh here afterwards and um i i did learn a lot in education manag
ement while i was at bay of course i did a lot of beer cosmetics and all of other things that we do uh in consulting projects but anyway i could direct a little bit of my time in government and education projects and after being i went to stanford for my master's in education i felt like i needed to to have this deep dive in the sector before i i made another move uh to work deeper in education and i am since then um at sonia granger and i'm also as you can see i think very excited about what i
do uh the career i had was not that straight a lot of people tried to understand what does pain have to do with this decision and career in education but i think the important thing for me was like to start somewhere and then learn more and refine uh what aspect in education i wanted to work with what the joining that with uh my skills and i'm really happy to be working with this uh through sonia grangy where i can join education management but also a school specific school program and have this
opportunity given to a lot of students in brazil i think in the interest of time now we're gonna open up to some questions and i am gonna start here with the first question which is an interesting question for the non-for-profit sector the question is what opportunities do you see to enlarge the philanthropic pie in that um today only 0.2 percent of latin america gdp goes to philanthropy compared to two percent of the united states um does anybody want to take a shot at that question i would li
ke to open up um saying that at least for mexico the non-profit sector has traditionally been uh non um less professional and i don't know if the right that's the right word but people that have an mba from stanford don't go uh to a not-for-profit um usually the non-pro the non-profits are established because of a personal link so if you have a son a daughter a friend that something happened then you start this not-for-profit in relation to that so it's usually people that are very motivated sel
f-motivated by by the situation but not necessarily as professional so i think in mexico sometimes that creates an issue of reporting of accountability and it makes fundraising harder i do think however the non-for-profit sector in mexico is moving towards a more professional sector and that will actually allow us to increase the percentage of of giving so well that that's kind of opening up the question uh but any thoughts on that i want to start by saying that in mexico is even lower the last
number that i saw was in 2017 was point one percent compared to two percent and i think uh i i agree with julia one of them is is the responsibility and our job of us nonprofit to gain the trust or donors philanthropists to say that we have the professional skills that we're really impacting the the the people that we're saying that we're impacting so it's part of our responsibility but it's also a cultural aspect so uh when i moved to mexico after expanding in 14 years in the united states i no
ticed this difference i will create a campaign for an organization that works in mexico that supports mexican students and like 70 of the donations that i will get will come from my friends in the united states americans and 30 percent only from mexicans and i will be like what is happening like why can mexicans not support a mexican non-profit that is helping students and i read some studies and one of the things that i found is that it has to do with family names so actually in mexico as we co
mpare it to the us the us is a more individualistic society in which people decide what to do with their money they're empowered to say what am i gonna do in the case of mexico these wealthy individuals their name their last name carries power through generations so they are more scared to give more money because they gotta keep that that going on so like it had to do with that individual and uh collective aspect of society so definitely we need to figure out ways in which we change that other a
spect was security many mexicans also giving that the crime the corruption etc they don't feel comfortable giving big amounts to a non-profit because they don't know where what are the repercussions of that so it's first trusting the nonprofit what if they don't use it for the right thing we have seen many cases in mexico of corruption so they don't trust this and also the the privacy like what if they pose in a place that i donated 2 million pesos to this mexican non-profit and then someone wan
ts to kidnap me or rock me and things like that so i read those things but like uh to summarize part of our job is to be responsible and and creating trust with the donors and invested invested in talented people so actually hiring people for development you cannot expect to fundraise money if you don't have people that know how to fundraise in the case of antenna for mexico there is six of us that are always actively looking to get this and we have studied psychology we have studied reports to
understand how to cultivate relationships with donors and the second aspect to figure out ways in which we break uh we break out these mindsets uh of why we don't donate as a mexican population so that's what i would like to say we have another question what is the best way to support rural areas in the region without promoting brain drain rural areas rarely offer education beyond middle school do we encourage students to leave or do we invest in decentralizing high school and higher education s
ystems um so speaking speaking from from our perspective uh braid really is a giant risk in our model uh at lala because if you find these super high potential kids and then supercharge them give them access to networks and so on that what's what what holds them or what makes them return or stay their communities uh there's there's a few ways we we think about it uh the deal one is that instead of filtering first for high achieving kids uh as most organizations do we filter first for purpose for
purpose connected to their community or like we're looking for kids who see themselves as uh potentially be ages of change for the community the province that they grew up in and that is that can be a very strong motivator if if you feel like your profits or your community has been forgotten or de-prioritized by the capital city by washington dc by the elites and so on then you're like maybe i can do something about this and and that is that is one one first uh mindset shift in what we filter f
or then par part of the idea longer term is that by developing this generation of uh diverse and geographically distributed uh change makers that we don't have to continue thinking about how do we go out there to those communities to transform them from here but rather how do we develop the change makers from within and if there's actually a lot of uh interesting development developments emerging all over latin america very decentralized very organic very grassroots they're probably they're not
well organized uh but that can be one way that you can avoid the usual issues uh of like oh the teacher didn't show up at the school or oh the kid has to walk two hours to go to the school there's still lunch at the school these are all very forward problems to us because we're solving problems that that we don't really understand we don't live there and so so developing leaders in those communities and empowering them to find the best tools out there for their communities i think could be a muc
h more sustainable solution and what we're finding at lala is that uh helping these kind of kids from rural areas from favelas and so on to find their unique value proposition to the world can be if you just look at it from like a behavior economics perspective that can be a more dominant strategy for them than trying to get into a good university study a good degree and then compete with everyone else in the world to get the consulting jobs the investment job they degenerate job uh for all the
brazilians right like that one edu leader of genre for course that's a much better personal strategy for himself than trying to get a standard job and we're realizing that we can do this systematically but as you've heard all of us say these things are systemic right like it's not enough to just find a kid from a rural area give them access to education because then who's going to fund them who's going to be their mentor who's going to give them that first internship so you have to tackle both t
he education and the network the ecosystem of the community at once and i think a few of our models are doing that i know at least la les i know that teach for all is i i i don't want to speak for the others but uh you have to think systemically because otherwise if you over focus on on the one little thing you're moving the detail on then there could be a cliff at the end of your program but the kids fall off after that okay another question here says how do we best help non-profits well money
first and but also your time i mean we here we focus on people giving their own time and that's the most important asset and money is just a consequence but but that's it i mean for us it's really simple because i mean go ahead i will say that and definitely here i'm gonna be more direct definitely money uh i think is the main need that we have non-profits the four of us i mean that we have a non-profit we're always looking for fundraising so if you want to support nonprofit that you trust the t
eam that they're showing you the results the best for you is to give money or like i would say to felipe to give your time in areas strategic to the organization many times we have companies reaching out to us to volunteer to pay a school like that is not your talent if you really want to help us and you are a financial advisors come help us with financial advising and give us the money to operate but i definitely i i definitely say that it is the need for resources in nonprofit we already see t
hese numbers point two percent versus two percent in that in america we definitely need more money from individuals like us that that can afford it and other thing is giving it unrestricted again it's like do not limit the way you're giving your money because you are limiting the nonprofit for its opportunities to grow of course as a nonprofit to give you the results of that core program do not create a particular program for your company allow them to use that donation in the best way possible
for them because the people that know better how to use that money are the people that are in the communities and i cannot assure you that in the case of insania for mexico we are so transparent with these resources but it is better for us when you allow us to invest these resources on the area that we did at the most i'd like to add a a perspective or from a non-profit that does not fundraise um i i can imagine the situation is similar for you julia uh in the case of the foundation so we uh of
course understand that nonprofits uh generally uh have this as a primary issue and one thing that i would like to reinforce is the the point that juan made about uh giving your time in specific things and what is your expertise so as i said sometimes uh having a great team doing their best is an important challenge for us so for example having the consultants helping us in strategic problems uh or having i don't know stanford trained marketing specialists or people specialists mentoring our lead
ership team for example helping getting them motivated because having experienced mentors references also helps with motivation but especially guiding us uh in navigating uh whatever the issues are specific for their organization so even uh even when resource money is not necessarily a need there's still a lot of things to be done and we are open we're going to send our contacts afterwards through the email so we are very excited to have uh support coming from all of you the stanford community u
m i would from my perspective well plus one two for for any non-profits out there fundraising out out plus one uh to everything juan manuel said uh what i would add also is um to to i guess have an understanding of of how like how much you will really commit to supporting a nonprofit because what at least what has happened to us is that sometimes people are like oh like how can i help uh or or hey let's talk and let's talk about it next week and we'll find something and then you have a lot of ex
ploratory conversations with people and then many of them eventually are like oh no like i was just shopping around like this is actually not the right fit or they're like okay cool like this is the right fit i can give something like like three hours per week and all of a sudden with all the over stretching you have as a as a non-profit founder on top of that now you have to manage a few uh external volunteers who are putting in relatively few hours and i mean potentially those those can be ver
y high impact towers but just remember that in part you're entering especially if you're bringing a particular set of expertise like you're a consultant investment banker or something uh to also bring your humility to come with an open mind to learn what are the challenges that this organization is facing to be very self-directed as much as possible like come in and uh with a with a general mindset of how do i uh provide capacity reduce workloads uh i like don't see it primarily as like oh it's
gonna be fun to talk to different people in this org and have interesting conversations with the founder and so on because they're overstretched they're super busy so be like like if you have access to to the founder the sea levels just be like look tell me what are the biggest what are the biggest problems you have right now and let's figure out which one i could just completely take off your plate and if you if you are coming in knowing that you want to prioritize this but you will have both t
he time and the energy and i think sometimes people don't think about this right they're like well i work 80 hours a week in consulting i have another 15 hours per week i want to volunteer the problem is that those 15 hours you don't have energy so thinking about okay how many hours with energy you actually have that you can generally commit to and that you could have a conversation with a leadership team and say like all right what is something what is the problem that i can take off your plate
i'll report back in two weeks if it's fundraising amazing it could be some operational excellence improvement project it could be building partnerships uh but figuring out how do you take work off the org uh and also bring in this this learning mindset to all of this uh can be super super helpful for originally receivers i think we're out of time so i would just like to close by saying um if everybody could give just a one-liner what you want anybody to take away if you could just say like one
thing that people could take away from this what would that be well um i think we discussing before shared this vision that there is amazing talent and productivity being wasted in latin america every day because we have such a poor education offer so in any ways that you can everything that we just talked about uh engage a lot of your businesses and our countries will benefit a lot from this along those lines i think i would like to say and that education is a very complex problem and is it req
uires a systemic change and by that means that all of us no matter what feel uh who we are we need to be involved to change this and make the world a better place it is our responsibility to make a world a better place and so i will live with that well for me i think that because such a huge problem i mean if you can't just donate like a small part of your time i mean you don't have to quit your job or something like that you know i have my two lives that i always say in the morning i work in th
e ngo and like after 9 a.m i go to my job and so if you at least start doing something in your neighborhood or you know some someone that you know that need needs an educational opportunity that will be more than enough to start and then you get addicted and then eventually you quit your job but you know before that at least do something and you'll be helping a lot of people for me i like to leave you with two senses of urgency that have been very alive in my journey the first is that like we ta
lked about these are pressing problems in latin america uh educational systems her social mobility structures are all broken and who knows how many nelson since steve jobs and bill gates are being wasted every single year latin america so kind of like that quote of like the best time to plant the tree was 20 years ago the second best time is right now i think it's exactly the same for these issues in latin america we should have solved these problems decades ago we didn't the next time is right
now otherwise uh we totally deserve what's coming our way over the next few decades so that's the first sense of urgency the second one i hope you heard us talk about everything we've learned well i i i think we've only scratched the surface of of what we've learned since we joined this journey and that's often uh something we don't talk much about right we always say how satisfying how gratifying it is but you also just learn so much about the most complex problems in the continent so i think t
here's also urgency for yourselves to get involved somehow at like not everyone's gonna be a founder or a funder you could be a volunteer an advisor a supporter but just start getting involved so that you can start learning about these issues uh otherwise i mean at least i remember the story we told ourselves at mckinsey that like oh we're learning all of these transferable skills and one day we will you know just transfer them to the most complex problems that we've never talked about and i i t
hink that's a little bit naive if you're really trying to get into these completely intractable social economic problems in latin america there's urgency in your own learning so get involved as soon as possible thank you everybody for sharing that with us i think we as we wrap this up we can all agree on the fact that um education in latin america is something that we really need to focus on the region will not move forward until we actually tackle that problem like juan manuel said it is a comp
lex issue with many things involved but i am sure that each one of you guys from your own set of um your own space are doing um a lot to advance it to transform it um i think that you are using um like we said it originally so many things that we have learned throughout our time um during our career and at stanford and i think that is going to come to transform and to really impact the education system in what you do i echo what diego said at the end this is urgent we really need to solve this p
roblem both for the present but more specifically for the future and we must all participate in some way and i think everybody said how we're going to participate but i just would like to close um adding what i think that i would like everybody to take away and i think sometimes with a day-to-day sometimes with our jobs our families we just don't see things so i used to drive before to a school to my job and go back by a school and the school had no computers and no windows and i didn't notice y
ou just keep your job and your day-to-day makes you stop seeing so i think what i would like everybody to take away from this is we cannot stop seeing we need to see we need to focus on the problem and we need to participate in this problem so that an american can all move forward i don't know if anybody else wants to add something else or if we go back to you mary
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