How I Built Resilience: Elisa Villanueva Beard of Teach For America

Hey everyone and welcome to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR. I'm Guy Raz, and on these episodes, we're hearing from entrepreneurs and business leaders about how they've been building resilience into their businesses during this very challenging year. And today my conversation with Alisa Villanueva Beard. CEO of Teach for America. Teach for America is a nonprofit that recruits members to teach in low income communities. And if you want to hear the story of how it began, I interviewed the founder Wendy Cop back in October of twenty seventeen on the podcast, so check that out. Anyway, about Eighty percent of Teach for America alums have a career in education or serve low income communities, and that includes Elisa.

You yourself went through the program in in nineteen ninety eight, um What made you interested in pursuing a career in education? Well, guy, you know, my story's quite personal. I grew up in South Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, right on the Texas Mexico border. That's where my story and interest begins. Um, my mom came to the United States from Mexico at the age of 17 with a formal eighth grade education. She quickly figured out the pathway to opportunity in this country is education. So she'll often tell us You know, my first most important decision as a young adult was deciding I was gonna marry a man with a college degree, because I knew my kids' lives would be different, which is quite literally how she chose my father. It's a true story. Well they're still together. Forty eight years later, dad's a first generation college graduate. Anyway, I was the kid that did everything right in high school. I ended up in college in the Midwest. It is

liberal arts small college DePaul University in Green Castle, Indiana. Um, and the short story is that when I got there, I thought gosh, the hardest part of this is gonna be adapting to a very different place at the time. Um De Pa was three percent Latino, five percent black. But I quickly realized that was not the hard part. The hard part was coming to understand I was underprepared for the rigors of college. Which is shocking because I was an A clas student.

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