My parents came to the US in 1995, and two years later I was born. My first zip code was housed in South Central, Los Angeles, not the kindest of cities. From gang violence to poverty, and tons of crime, it isn\u2019t a city for a child to grow up. Thankfully it didn\u2019t take long for us to move, and three years later we ended up in a couple different zip codes and ended up in Pomona. My Y story begins in Pomona, with my parents taking me to the Pomona YMCA to get me swim lessons. I eventually joined the Jr. Lakers, joined swim teams, and never wanted to leave the YMCA. To me the Y was a big part of my childhood. In 2005, my sister was born and months later we found ourselves in Avondale, AZ. It was our first big move and sadly a Y wasn\u2019t in the area at the time until the South West YMCA opened up and my family moved to Goodyear, where I spent the next ten years of my life at, the longest time I ever was able to call a zip code mine. My high school experience is when my nonprofit passion began with a ton of volunteer work with local nonprofits and charities. High school for me was a time of discovery as I had no idea what I wanted to do, and after graduating in 2015 from Desert Edge with a 3.85 GPA, honors, and a full ride to Arizona State University, I was as lost as ever of what the future had in store for me.<\/p>\n
I majored at ASU with a Bachelor of Science in Nonprofit Leadership & Management and on May 9th<\/sup> I graduated with cum laude, 3.56 GPA, and was a certified nonprofit professional ready to change the world. But that wasn\u2019t the case a few months prior where my Y journey truly began. November 2018 I was told my final semester was to be a senior internship, and I scrambled through the hundred business cards and LinkedIn connections I had to find something.<\/p>\n But then the lightbulb lit up and I remembered the impact the Y had on my childhood and figured it was my time to give back. I reached out to the Chandler Y to see if they could squeeze me in for a three-month internship and began my career as a Sports Coordinator. I did the YMCA Leadership Academy, a program founded by the Valley of the Sun YMCA to train graduating seniors in the nonprofit sector to be the best Y professional they can be through hands on training, in branch experience, and top-level leadership taught classes. While the internship was by far one of the toughest experiences I faced, I saw it to the end, graduated both ASU and YLA, and can proudly say I am the Sports Director of the Chandler YMCA, ready to impact my community and give the youth the same opportunities the YMCA gave to me almost 20 years ago.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My parents came to the US in 1995, and two years later I was born. My first zip code was housed in South Central, Los Angeles, not the kindest of cities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":17688,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-member-spolight"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valleyymca.org\/chandler-gilbert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/valleyymca.org\/chandler-gilbert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/valleyymca.org\/chandler-gilbert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valleyymca.org\/chandler-gilbert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valleyymca.org\/chandler-gilbert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17783"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/valleyymca.org\/chandler-gilbert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17792,"href":"https:\/\/valleyymca.org\/chandler-gilbert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17783\/revisions\/17792"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valleyymca.org\/chandler-gilbert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valleyymca.org\/chandler-gilbert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valleyymca.org\/chandler-gilbert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valleyymca.org\/chandler-gilbert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}