User:Everardomi

Everardo Martinez-Inzunza,

everardomi@yahoo.com

Education leaders are required to formulate strategic visions that are compelling to communities and communicate individual purposeful engagement.

Successful leaders see complex and dynamic relationships within diverse communities. This is especially important, as our world becomes one global unit. Visionary traits acquired and mastered through successful experiences in relevant positions.

Immediate are those qualities, which make leaders caring individuals, however, management and business leadership are also quintessential attributes.

A brief listing of abilities would have to include sensitivity and understanding of the diverse academic, socioeconomic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds of those served. The leadership style has to demonstrate the abilities to facilitate shared governance within the institution and respect and inclusion of all stakeholders in the community.

Our country’s economic reality has also mandated our leaders to be able to function as external funding generators.

Cultural and ethnic diversity have become a tremendous challenge to institutions working in the areas of improvement of access, retention and eventual professional placement of students from multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, low income backgrounds.

It is well known how much ground is needed to attain equal representation in educational leadership positions. It is also well known the immense ground needed to gain in representation within the student populations in higher education. The severity of the case calls for cooperative, collaborative team building.

The lessons learned from the experiences and the reflections, which they accompany, will be valuable.

The importance of national and international networks of support must be appreciated. The work done in one institution can benefit many more institutions if the proper transference is applied.

Institutional leaders have to commit to a high degree of achievement to make substantive advances. Students must continue to raise their academic expectations and our institutions must provide the appropriate environments for that success.

It is humbling to compare time invested in careers and the outcomes achieved.

I remember very clearly thirty-two years ago, I was just starting my college career. I was part of a young group of people who received a Bank of America Future Teachers Scholarship for Agricultural Education. We outlined our educational and professional plans for the next twenty years.

There was innocent optimism present in every sentence of that written plan. That optimism still exists in my heart; however, hard and painfully earned lessons have laced them with patient realism. As I look back, I have dedicated my entire career to the same visions of equality, justice, and progress and supported these visions with excellence, academic hard work and dedication. I did become an agricultural instructor for displaced farm workers in California. These farm workers were just starting their businesses as independent family farmers. That is where some of the hardest lessons begun. Their life was difficult, economic realities were very harsh and only the strongest family units survived. Those experiences with the family farms in the California Central Valley also taught me some of the most meaningful lessons that I have learned. Sacrifice, dedication hard work and optimism have no substitutes. I also learned emotionally tangible meanings of mi gente, la causa, and  si se puede as I marched in the fields of Mendota California with Cesar Chavez. Years later, working with middle school children and high school adolescents also weaved the youthful esperanza into my fiber. I have witnessed the emotional and intellectual growth from my students in Upward Bound, countless summer institutes for EOP students, presentations to MESA students in Bakersfield, Fresno State Chicano Youth conference speeches, and hundreds of speeches delivered to mostly Latino youth in schools all over California, Utah and now Arizona. My curriculum vitae is a long road map dedicated to the improvement of educational opportunities for students of multicultural backgrounds mostly Hispanic population. I have founded and co-founded many educational organizations dedicated to assisting students succeed in college. I am a firm believer that cooperative models are essential for communities to advance economically and socially. I also know that appropriate education structures are at the heart of these models. I served four years as president-elect, president (two terms) and past-president of the Utah Coalition for the Advancement of Minorities in Higher Education, (UCAMHE). This experience was tremendously valuable in demonstrating the potential of multicultural groups working together. The demographic challenges in this state require diplomacy and assertiveness. The Native American population and the Latino groups have achieved great advances together. I dedicate my career to advancing our Hispanic educational agenda recognizing it as a very important component of our national success a democratic nation. I am enthusiastic to work in the field of education and I am very proud to administer the institutions, which have now become so vital in this nation’s future success. I believe in very high personal standards and that our self-empowerment is the key to our long-term success. As a community with a shared vision, we can advance a common agenda.