Page 31 - ChildArt_2021.Q1_Global Creative Leaders

30 CHILDART GLOBAL CREATIVE LEADERS
EMPOWERING
OTHERS
CARMEN ROJAS, PHD
PRESIDENT + CEO
MARGUERITE CASEY FOUNDATION
SEATTLE
She earned a doctorate at UC Berkeley where she
also taught for one year. Today she heads a private
foundation with nearly $800 million in assets. Dr.
Carmen Rojas grew up in a busy household in San
Jose, California. Her mother, an immigrant from
Nicaragua, worked as a secretary for the school
district. Her father, an immigrant from Venezuela,
drove a truck. Her brothers, fourteen and sixteen
years older than her, earned their GEDs but never
graduated high school. Her home exuded the hard
work and energy of a family establishing itself in
a new country. Recently, while cleaning out a box
of photos, Carmen discovered an old report that she
had written in elementary school. It was laminated
by her mother as a keepsake. Carmen had written
that she wanted to be a college teacher.
What produced that dream in her? “I was not around
any professors, and in my immediate family there
weren’t those kinds of people around me that
created a way for me to imagine the future that I
would end up living, and that it could be such a
whole and rich future for me.” Her father was an
avid reader. He took her to the San Francisco Book
Festival every year. He was also a collector of vinyl
records and loved all kinds of music. Carmen loved
music too. “My dad’s way of traveling, I think, was
through music.” Her mother, the second eldest of
seventeen kids, came to the U.S. as a teenager,
really by herself, not speaking any English and with
only a middle school education. “My mom did such
a great job lighting a fire of joy inside of me and
making sure that I protected that, that it was mine
to protect, mine to cultivate, mine for my life. I think
that’s such an amazing thing.”
CARMEN ROJAS EMPOWERING OTHERS
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Her older brothers were not overly protective. “They
created a lot of room for me to be creative, to be free, to
understand my place in the world. They were really
supportive. And especially my eldest brother—he had
a set of expectations for me that were sort of beyond
what my parents even could have imagined.”
Carmen lived in an extended family household with her
grandmother, her aunts and uncles, and her cousins. “I
don’t remember a time in my childhood when I wasn’t
surrounded by family.” This made her feel she was a
part of something so much bigger. There were many
people, many stories, so much laughter, and loads of
experiences and perspectives to share. She had a set
of teachers that allowed her to tap into a creative future,
to tap into a desire for something more than what
existed. “They believed that I could be the architect
of my destiny, which I think is such a powerful thing for
teachers to do.” Her family and school provided her the
security and aspiration while the books she read gave
her the curiosity and inspiration. “I am the expression
of the dreams of a lot of people in my life,” she says.
She explains that “when you grow up around so many
people with so many different experiences, there’s
an understanding of an ‘us’ that’s different than a
‘me’. That orientation has always been a part of who
I am and what I want. And that’s the commitment I
grew up with.”
She attended one of the largest high schools in
California, with 4,000 students. She joined a community
college before transferring to UC Santa Cruz. As a
junior, her mentor was a city planner for San Jose. “I
didn’t know what city planning was. As we spent more
time together I realized that I loved cities because
they are important laboratories for our social and
economic stories. The stories that we make, that we
want for each other, they’re like a perfect geography
for me.” She earned a Fulbright Scholarship to study
the Venezuelan economy under Hugo Chavez’s
revolutionary movement. Visiting her dad’s old country,
she realized she was first and foremost an American.
“In Venezuela I’m a white person and in the United
States I’m not, and that was very difficult.” Barack
Obama was campaigning to become the president,
which symbolized a tectonic change in the U.S. “I never
felt more like I belonged to the United States than when
I was on my Fulbright in Venezuela.” She felt she had
to be a changemaker who shifts the narrative of power
to create a truly representative economy. “I just really
refused to be the last generation of people in this
country that got to benefit from a robust social safety
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