The business of building communities
Among them, Edmundo Hidalgo, David Adame and Martin Quintana hold six degrees from the W. P. Carey School of Business. All three were undergraduate business students in the 1980s, and all three returned to complete the W. P. Carey MBA program. And, with strong resumes in the banking industry, they could be executives in Fortune 500 companies today — if that’s what they had wanted.
Instead, they form the leadership team at Chicanos Por La Causa, Inc. (CPLC), a Phoenix-based community development corporation committed to empowering individuals with economic development, education, health and human services, and housing. Hidalgo (B.A. Economics ’88, MBA ’00) is president and chief executive officer, Adame (B.S. Finance ’86, MBA ’04) is the chief operating officer and Quintana (B.S. General Business ’87, MBA ’04) is the chief economic development officer. Arjelia Gomez, chief financial officer, completes the team.
The non-profit sector comprises about 10 percent of the nation’s private workforce, or about 10.7 million employees, including many with business degrees. CPLC employs some 40 W. P. Carey alumni. Most are driven by a desire to make a difference in the world by applying their business training to solving socio-economic problems.
And there’s no shortage of challenge in the non-profit sector. For example, CPLC provides 34 programs that help families and build community — a broad mission calling for deep resources. It’s true that the organization funds programs through grants, but its for-profit businesses underwrite a large part of total expenses. These enterprises in turn provide jobs for the very people CPLC is trying to help and stimulus for struggling neighborhoods. This self-sufficiency-based business model is a new template that is being applied at other non-profits around the country.
“When you think about the complexity of an organization like CPLC or the non-profit sector as a whole, all of the things that you learn in business school and in business apply,” says Hidalgo. “A lot of times people think that because we’re a not-for-profit there are different rules, but the only difference in the rules is the tax status. Other than that you have to be efficient, you have to be able to serve your customers, you have to manage a budget and bring in revenue so that you operate in the black. All of those principals still apply.”
But unlike the corporate world, where the objective is profit and shareholder value, at CPLC the objective is stronger families and communities — in other words, social impact. And for these three leaders, that’s a powerful hook.
In the beginning: Sun Devils
All three men grew up in close-knit Hispanic communities: Hidalgo and Quintana in Arizona border towns, and Adame in the barrio of south Phoenix.
Hidalgo was considering applying to the University of Arizona as well as Arizona State University. He says with a laugh that his mother made the decision for him when she pointed out that he could live with his aunt if he went to Tucson.
During high school in Parker, Ariz., Quintana gravitated toward math and other subjects. He started his higher education at Mesa Community College, taking even more business classes, but always had his eye on ASU’s highly regarded business school.
Adame was a music major for his first year at ASU, playing in the band. But his practical father urged him to think about becoming an accountant, so in his second year David switched to finance. He remembers looking at the bank buildings in downtown Phoenix when he was a child, and thinking “that’s where I will work one day,” so the decision to change plans came easily.
When the three arrived in the 1980s, Arizona State University was well on its way to becoming one of the largest universities in the nation. But despite the size, a Hispanic student often saw relatively few students like himself in class. The Hispanic Business Students Association (HBSA) became a cultural sanctuary.
HBSA was actively involved in the community, and the men remember participating in car washes, parades, causes and celebrations. Hidalgo said that HBSA is where he “caught the bug” to serve the community. Adame added that the club gave them opportunities to develop leadership skills, including the ability to articulate ideas clearly and present them to a group. Management professor Louis Olivas, who worked closely with HBSA, was like a second father, he said.
The friendships formed in the organization developed into a personal and professional network that the men still access today. But HBSA also pointed the three down a road that led them to work at CPLC, first as interns and eventually as the non-profit’s senior leaders.
Intersecting paths
The years following graduation saw all three building careers. Hidalgo worked in retail banking (a great way to learn business, he said) at First Interstate Bank in Phoenix. Later he did a stint in the federal government before returning to Chicanos Por La Causa 16 years ago. Adame continued to work at CPLC after graduation during the late ’80s recession before being recruited by a board member to run a credit loan program at Valley National Bank. Quintana started his career at Kraft Foods, where being inside a big national corporation gave him “a lot of hope about what I could do.”
Under Hidalgo’s leadership, the executives rotate roles every two years, which gives each the depth of knowledge to articulate CPLC’s history and mission. CPLC was founded in the late 1960s by a group of student and community activists who wanted to address the problems of the barrios of south central Phoenix. In those early years, the organization was assisted by the Southwest Council of La Raza (now the National Council of La Raza), a civil rights and advocacy group. The young CPLC lent support to Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers of America. They shared space at the Santa Rita Center, the building near downtown Phoenix where Chavez staged his 24-day hunger strike in 1972 and where he first said “Si se puede” — “Yes we can.” The building is part of a proposed National Historic Park.
Within a year of its founding, CPLC began offering services to the communities in south and central Phoenix. According to its website, CPLC has grown to become the state’s largest Hispanic community-based organization, serving more than 125,000 people throughout Arizona. It provides work to more than 750 employees and a ripple of economic impact to the rest of the community.
The business of helping people
Today, CPLC goes about community development on both a micro and macro scale. The agency provides “wrap around services” to help struggling individuals and families get on their feet. That can include anything from family counseling to job placement. Job creation, in fact, is a big part of the strategy. CPLC actually runs businesses that employ people from the community. It develops real estate, rents housing units and runs fast food restaurants. It even opened an insurance business in partnership with Blue Cross Blue Shield. It also occasionally invests in big projects like the Hotel Palomar at CityScape in downtown Phoenix.
“That kind of project has so much of a ripple effect beyond job creation: it’s the tax base, it’s the vending opportunities for small business, it’s creating more rooms so the city can attract more conventions,” said Adame. He mentioned the project to make the point that “when we get into the board room we break everything down into its economic impact.”
Other non-profits have long used businesses to support their programs. One that comes to mind is Goodwill Industries and its stores. Another is the Girl Scouts with their cookie sale. “CPLC was on board with this idea many years ago, and now we’re taking it up to a whole new level,” Quintana said. Other non-profits have noted CPLC’s success and are coming to the agency to find out how to replicate the model.
“We share information with them,” he said. “In this environment you have to be entrepreneurial — you have to be willing to take the risk to try things and see how they work out and how they benefit the community,” Quintana added. “That’s something we picked up through school and obviously through our business experience.”
One of the four pillars of CPLC is education. The shared governance model CPLC has adopted for its executive team has been applied throughout the organization, where employees work in teams and rotate responsibilities, learning along the way. This has made CPLC effective, but it has also rendered CPLC a training ground that has been the launching pad for careers outside of the organization.
“We have always cultivated young people, going back to us as examples — we were given our first shot at a career, so we’re trying to do the same for others,” Hidalgo said. “We try to bring in young people either through internships or through hiring, to give them their first career opportunity before they go out to work in the world. And that’s something that has paid tremendous dividends for the organization. Now we have a CPLC network, in every industry in every part of the state and many other states, and it allows us to go out and call on people who are alumni. We took that from ASU: we learned networking, we learned the utilization of alumni and we brought it here.”
Adame said that CPLC has evolved from the grassroots organization where he interned into a full professional organization, where the defining management tool is the balanced scorecard and staff development is articulated in an “achieving excellence” program. As CPLC grows, he said, these management approaches will assure that a highly qualified staff grows along with it.
“It’s about the work that we do and the impact that we have.”
“For us it’s about the work that we do and the impact that we have — that’s part of what keeps us grounded,” Hidalgo said. “But we recognize that what we’ve done is just the tip of the iceberg. We know that there’s a lot more need and a lot more impact that we could be making. And nobody holds us to a higher standard than we hold ourselves.”
