Changeist

In 2004 Mario served as an AmeriCorps member with City Year San Jose and Philadelphia. After his service he joined City Year Staff, In 2007 Mario moved back to California to found City Year Los Angeles. In 2014 Mario conceived of, designed and launched Changeist. Changeist mobilizes young people from all different walks of life, places them on diverse teams and immerses them in a 7-month civic action experience, exploring the issues they care most about. Changeist launched in 2015 and by 2019 was identified by the Governor’s office as the youth development model to scale across California to increase civic engagement for all Californians.

Mario serves on multiple boards, and most recently was selected out of thousands of applicants from over 160 countries to be a 2019 Obama Foundation Fellow. The Obama Fellowship supports outstanding civic innovators from around the world to amplify the impact of their work.

At 20 years old when I found AmeriCorps. I was thrust into a diverse team of people from different walks of life and it changed my whole world view. I was forced to confront my own racial bias. I was pushed to face my insecurities of being an uneducated brown kid working in my community with white educated peers. I was pushed harder than I ever thought I could handle. After spending over a decade in building AmeriCorps programs across the country I asked myself- what if I had my service year when I was 11? How different would my life be? So I launched Changeist.I was a young disenfranchised person that wanted to make a difference in the world and didn't have the outlet. There are thousands of young people in this country that are just waiting for their call. I want to create a place they can meet. 

We face many issues in the world: racism, climate change, failing education systems, housing. Over time there has been one group of people who have taken on the status quo and shifted these big issues: Young people. Young people are our risk takers and big thinkers. They are our courageous, brave, better halves of society. Changeist mobilizes young people (11-26) from all different walks of life, places them on diverse teams and takes them through a 7-month civic experience, exploring and taking action on issues they care about. There are many amazing youth-serving organizations doing similar work, but almost none of them are bringing this scale of youth together, this often, from many neighborhoods, to engage in this type of civil discourse. I don’t think change will come if we only build pipelines of talent to change politics or be successful college graduates. I believe that if we can influence the way young people understand the world around them on their terms, that lens will help them change they way they govern local politics, operate a business, teach in a classroom, or parent a child. The shift in their lens will be there no matter what they choose to pursue.

At Changeist we are connecting young leaders, activating enthusiastic, and informed change makers. We are little league for civic action. Here is how the model works- Any youth can apply, we do not use merit-based admission. After the application process and interviews, youth are enrolled and placed on a diverse team with a near peer team leader. Our community meets three Saturdays per month (9am-4pm) for 7 months between January and July. At the end of each year, all our young people will serve a minimum of 100 hours to their community. Our youth are ages 11-26 from different neighborhoods and backgrounds, and in this little league- we practice activism. We break up 22 Saturdays into three distinct learning modules. We spend the first 6 weeks focused on identity and how issues connect to our lived experiences. The second 8 week series is focused on community learning. We combine simulations, workshops, and art with tours of organizations and learning from leaders. In the final 8 weeks, teams focus on a final project- middle school teams put together an event for friends and family, while the high school teams are embedded in a non-profit to work with leaders in the field. 

Our young people are courageous, committed, curious and adventurous. They come from over 75 different schools, 90 zip codes, and 27 cities across the greater Los Angeles region and Stockton/ San Joaquin County. Youth come from low income and affluent families, from mixed-status and multigenerational Californians, and some are formerly homeless and justice impacted, while others are at the top of their class at high ranked private schools. We didn’t build a program for disenfranchised or privileged youth, we didn’t design curriculum for "high achievers" or “at risk youth” we created a space for any young person that sees challenges in their city or community and wants to do something about it. Youth in our program commit to waking up on 22 Saturdays between January and July, getting to the downtown, and spending eight hours with hundreds of other young people who want to learn about social justice, ask questions, and take action. The current models of civic engagement are often looking for impact in increase voter engagement, volunteerism or what a student can produce. We are are interested in understanding individuals shifts in heart and mind, this is more sustainable over time, this is how we change the world. 

In California, Changeist have completed hundreds of projects ranging from serving meals, to planting garden, and creating workshops for peers. Not only are Changeists having a huge impact on communities, they too are going through a transformation. We have learned that our youth develop an appreciation for teamwork and diversity, allowing them to more openly explore various social issues and perspectives. Youth see themselves differently after their experience at Changeist; they believe they are capable of positively impacting their communities in ways they didn’t conceive of before, and they feel empowered to drive social change and inspire others around them.

I was 29 and finishing up my 10th year at a non-profit. What began as youth work, pivoted to education. I wasn’t excited about the work anymore. Youth from the program I previously ran, reached out for help on community projects. I felt joy in being able to support their efforts. I needed to get back to this work. The initial idea was consulting for youth. I could gives access to resources and the support they needed to do the work they wanted. So I built a team. I gathered a group of friends, and over 4 months we crafted the frameworks of what would become Changeist. As my current job came to an end, I needed help with the business plan. I reconnected with a friend also looking for a change. After our first meeting, she committed to leaving her job to get this off the ground. Within two months we raised our first $25k through crowdfunding, by month 5 we recruited our first 75 youth, month 6 we raised over $200k completing our first year budget. That launch year was a resounding success with 92% retention of youth, and the beginnings of what would be a statewide initiative. 

Growing up, I was that "weird" kid. I wasn't into sports and didn't fit the mold of the male archetypes in my family, but I tried. As I do not regret pouring myself into sports as a kid, they never brought me joy. I would have much rather followed the nightly news or watch an episode of the "Oprah Winfrey Show" followed by "Donahue". I enjoyed the arts more, but they still didn't speak to me in the way local politics or pining over social inequities did. I failed to see the interconnectedness of arts, culture, and politics. That was because I never had a place to make those connections. This lack of space would keep me jumping from sport to sport, activity to activity. It wasn't until I joined AmeriCorps at 20 when I found my "place". I became surrounded by people that all wanted to shake up our systems and create change, and together, it felt like we could. Changeist is the answer to my 12 year-old self. It's for all the young people that are looking for that community of idealists and rebels. People shouldn't have to wait for adulthood for their shot to change the world.

Raised on the Eastside of San Jose, my middle class family was not immune to challenges of addiction, gangs, and trauma.  My experience weathering uncertainty led me to make the decision at 17, to put school on hold and find my independence. I was able to keep focused enough to sustain a roof over my head and find opportunities as they arose. At 20, I enrolled in AmeriCorps where I had to learn to design curriculum for youth and navigate a diverse team. With humility and a lot of failure, I learned lessons that allowed me to be a leader in youth civic engagement. When I was 22, I found myself consulting other cities within our network on how to successfully integrate civic leadership into their models. At 24, I helped launch a new organization in LA, uniting hundreds of young people around civic action. A couple years later I made a pivot into education. I was in my late twenties, with no formal education myself, supporting k-12 principals in shaping master schedules and implementing tiered intervention. All this to say, my whole life, I have been trying to fool people into believing I was smarter and more educated that I was. It turns out that those lived experiences were my education and emboldened me to believe I could launch an organization. In seven years, I have taken an idea from whiteboard to the first stages of scale. No more trying to fool people, I am enough. 

Starting Changeist, was mostly about bringing young people together and I would figure the rest out from there. A former colleague came out to see the work and said the program seemed fun and fluffy, but the youth weren’t making a big difference.This was hard to hear, but I decided to listen. I took a step back to reevaluate. We were missing a couple of important components that could open our doors to more diverse people and help increase the impact our youth could make. I asked this person to help, restructured my curriculum to include more critical action like political advocacy, more systems focus, and a disability justice lens. We codified these changes in our organizational values and revised the program with all the hard-hitting youth empowerment strategies still embedded. As the founder of this agency, I have potential to be the organization’s biggest liability. Founders can stunt growth, and to ensure we don’t become an outdated or surface-level program, I need to listen first and change strategy when appropriate.  

In 2011 the organization I work for decided to discontinue the civic engagement programs I designed and currently operated to focus on in-school programming. It crushed my spirit. I had committed 8 years in 3 cities to the program and its youth. I considered appealing the decision, but soon understood that the strategy behind it involved a greater organizational need. I chose to focus on what was best for the youth involved. Transparency was my priority throughout the process. I respected their need to vent frustrations, but was also aware of the risk of stewing on this discontent. Addressing the 300 enrolled youth was difficult and needed to be approached with great care. I responded to all concerns with honesty and patience. That night I made a promise that I would do everything I could to bring these programs back in the future. But first I returned to work, supporting the organization's in-school programming, grateful for all that organization had given me. In 2014, I made good on that promise and launched Changeist. In our first year, we had several families from that cohort find Changeist randomly, they were still looking to fill the void left from that program's absence. 

Changeist approaches youth work in a few ways that stand out from other organizations. First, we are a large-scale, neighborhood-agnostic program. The novelty of meeting peers from different neighborhoods is a huge part of the appeal to youth and exposes them to diverse perspectives. Second, we rely heavily on experiential learning: For instance, to learn about environmental rights, a group of youth may visit the LA River with a local guide one week and visit a fire station to learn about the impacts of drought the next week. As a final project, after engaging in learning activities, youth develop and lead service projects, or embed in a non-profit for what we call "externships". Third, we approach the work with a different “end game” in mind by building the leadership and critical thinking capacity of youth so that they may go out and make change from whatever “seats” they choose in their future. We do not prescribe a specific path, but develop an underlying sense of civic engagement and service that will inform any career. Finally, as an organization, we prioritize evaluation and continued quality improvement in a distinctive way, by keeping youth voice at the forefront with cutting-edge real-time feedback. We have identified ways to effectively measure how our program develops youth empowerment and civic engagement, analyzing data weekly, identifying why we may or may not be hitting each desired outcome, allowing our community to consistently develop more impactful experiences for youth.

Changeist Logic Model

Annually we have 400+ young people in our community. We are based in Los Angeles with a second location in Stockton, CA. In five years, our plan is to expand to 1000+ young people annually. In order to have the impact I wish to see, we need 10,000 + young people across dozens of urban centers and rural communities across the country. 

Due to Covid-19, our goals within the next year are to maintain a solid program with existing outcomes by navigating virtual learning and small group gatherings, while also retaining current levels of staffing. We expect to welcome a total of 283 young people, down from 400, to keep everyone safe. Within five years, we plan to add two more cities in the Central Valley, increasing our reach to 1000 young people in California. On the community side, we will create an equitable process for entering and sustaining in a new community to make sure we are welcomed and needed. Ahead of expansion, we will send teams a year out to explore the desire for our approach in those communities. This will call for private exploratory investments. We will need to increase the amount of Federal grants, along with City and Municipal commitments to sustain for the long term. As an organization we only expand if there is community consensus. We will hire local and not import talent. We will need to strengthen our on-boarding practices to ensure all new members understand our impact and are able to interpret it through the lenses of the community we will launch in. 

Within this next year, we will need to navigate technology in a new way, ensuring our staff are equipped to work from home for a longer period, and ensuring we can engage youth virtually. In addition, the impact COVID-19 has had on the economy may hinder our ability to raise private dollars. We have already seen corporations pull back, witnessed foundations double down on organizations within their current portfolio and pause on bringing on new projects. We are not sure how long that trend will continue. We have yet to see the real impacts on state and local budgets, which will have an immediate and long-term impact on us and our ability to expand to new communities. State funding propelled us into our Stockton expansion and our current plans rely on additional State funding to continue expansion. 

We made substantial cuts from our projected budget in the coming year, to see how the economy and philanthropy is impacted, so that we can ensure our ability to retain current levels of staffing and programming operations. We didn't want to plan big and have to pull back because of a tough market.  This short term pull back will give us space to "right-size" our program for the long haul. We hope that by taking a small step back will be better prepared to take huge leaps in 2022-23. It is our projection that in a post-Covid world, in-person social engagements will be in high demand and allow us the opportunity to grow within communities. 

In addition, we are sourcing tech hardware from board members and funders with access to this asset, so that we can support youth at home and enable them to more easily engage with us (and the rest of the virtual world!) With regard to funding, we are having early conversations with our current funders, making sure they understand our needs and how we are impacting youth over the next year.  We are also emphasizing the need for multi-year commitments. This will give us more space to build our pipeline of funders.

We have partnered with hundreds of organization over the years. We partner in several different ways:

• Recruitment partners- these are schools and CBOs that have access to 11-26 year olds. They allow us to come into their space to speak and actively recruit. 
• Content partners- these organizations support our design efforts. They may come in to lead a workshop on healing justice or support our community with a poverty simulation game. These organizations also welcome us into their space to take tours and learn about their missions. 
• Service partners- these partners are organizations that need help with small short term projects. They invite our youth into their space to volunteer and execute on capacity building projects. 
• Externship partners- these are partners that welcome teams of 10 high school youth to work on long-term capacity building projects. Examples of these are having a team work on canvassing a neighborhood to better understand positions on tenant rights. 
• University/College Partners- We work closely with UCLA, Claremont Graduate University, Cal State Los Angeles and University of the Pacific to recruit student volunteers, to partner on research and co-design curriculum.  

We are a fiscally sponsored project of Community Partners. We raise private, public/federal and individual dollars to support our efforts.  We strive to drive about 35% of our revenue through a federal grant with AmeriCorps. We match with private foundations and corporate dollars. We are currently creating a social justice ecosystem that begins with young people in middle school, allowing them to matriculate up through high school. At college age they have an opportunity serve with Changeist full-time as an AmeriCorps member designing opportunities for younger folks in the cohort. Our outcomes are focused on orienting hearts and minds toward justice. Youth leave our program showing significant changes in our program's 10 target outcomes in the areas of Character Development, Social Capital, and Sociopolitical Empowerment: 1. Diversity Attitudes 2. Gratitude 3. Teamwork 4. Curiosity & Exploration 5. Diverse Social Capital 6. Awareness of Social Issues 7. Motivation to Make Change 8. Sociopolitical ProblemSolving Skills 9. Experience Taking Action 10. Agent of Change Identity.

Our plan is that this would ripple out and create a more prepared workforce, and stronger electorate, agnostic of politics. This is why a public and private partnership is vital to our success over time. We are giving thousands of young people a community to learn and grow. 

We will need to continue to grow our federal grant from AmeriCorps. This piece of our revenue will allow us a solid foundation for scale. We will, however need to carve out a larger state or public dollar strategy to take the burden off raising private dollars which is finite. We currently raise much of our revenue from private sources (grants, corporations, individuals) we would like to continue to grow that part of our business at a steady pace while drastically increasing state and public funds in the coming years. An ideal breakdown would be 35% Federal, 35% State/public, and 30% private.  

In the last 12 months we raised ~$1.6 million. This was originally a larger projected budget, but due to Covid-19 we scaled back as did some funders. Our break down was as such: 60% government, public, and state. 32% foundations/individual giving. 8% corporate giving.   

Current supporters of our work:

• The California Endowment   
• The Satterberg Foundation
• Dwight Stuart Youth Fund
• Vera Campbell Foundation
• Chan Zuckerburg Initiative 
• Anonymous Donors (X3)
• Bank of the West
• Sony
• Oaktree Capital
• Point B Capital
• Ares Management
• CaliforniaVolunteers 
• Stockton Unified School District

In fiscal year 2021 we are looking to increase the amount of private dollars raised. This means we seek and additional ~$500,000 in foundation, individual, and corporate donations. To do this, we will need to widen our pipeline into markets we have not currently tapped. We will need to expand our board to help us develop relationships and attract new partners. 

In this year we've scaled back to prioritize current staff with no capacity building. This will allow us to stay relatively flat from where we were by the end of this year. We project a $1.6 million budget. In this budget we will need to rely less on state and public dollars and increase our private gifts. 

I have built an organization on the social capital I gained through national service. I have created a place that is welcoming and open to all that want to come. I need to expand my reach. The people that I need in this second phase of work will need to be different than those that helped me start up. If I want to expand to cities across the country, I need to meet leaders that can open doors for me that I can’t open alone. I may have an innovative wide-reaching organization across the state of California, but I am still just a brown kid from the eastside trying to figure this all out. I could use all the help I can get. 

I am constantly looking to improve my practice as a leader. As a team, we have large mountain ahead of us in terms of revenue generation to scale our work. I would really value you a fundraising coach or leads to potential donors. I am also looking for diverse and thoughtful board members to help me create a more equitable organization. We are still a relatively small organization with a lot of room to grow. I would like to make sure that our DNA is healthy and we launch for scale the right way that honors people and justice.  

I would love to make connections with the Emerson Collective. They are a brain trust of some of the most prolific innovators. I would love to somehow be a part of that community, even as an observer, as a so I can support efforts to increase civic engagement across the country and really push positive youth development into a new era.