Our dear friend and PTHV cofounder Howard Lawrence passed away last week. 

I’ve been sitting with that for a few days now, trying to find the right words. Howard wasn’t someone who needed a lot of words. He was someone who got things done and who understood, deeply, that getting things done required relationships. Real ones. Not the kind you perform for a meeting. The kind you build over years of showing up. 

That’s what he did at Sacramento Area Congregations Together (ACT) for three decades. He was a core leader, a board member, and at one point served as Interim Executive Director.  He believed that faith communities had a responsibility to organize, to act, to push systems toward something better. Howard was in the room for all of it, always building, always thinking about who had the power to make change and how to bring people together to get there. 

He also happened to be part of something that changed my life forever. And the lives of hundreds of thousands of children across the nation. 

When I came to Sacramento three decades ago, I was a mother desperate to get help for my daughter, who was in the fifth grade but reading at a first-grade level. The school wasn’t listening. I didn’t understand the “education” language they were using. And I was afraid to be seen as less than, afraid to be judged, afraid that if I pushed too hard, they would take my girls away. What turned things around for me was working with Sacramento ACT. We didn’t immediately know that those early days would lead to an organization like PTHV is today. It was just people. It was Sacramento ACT coming into our community, sitting with us, and teaching a group of parents, me, Jocelyn Graves, Sandy Johnson, that we weren’t powerless. That we could assess a problem, identify who had the authority to fix it, and act. 

Howard understood, before most institutions would admit it, that you can’t build trust from a distance. You have to go where people are. You have to listen before you speak. You have to believe that the parents in a South Sacramento neighborhood aren’t the problem. We were, in fact, the solution. 

Arm in arm, we challenged school leaders to look at what we were building and give it a try. He waited outside closed doors with us, he raised money, he spoke before elected officials, and he helped us understand our power as parents and lift our voices as community leaders. 

Howard later wrote about this work in his book, Hopes and Dreams: An Education Reform That Really Works, which traces the early story of what would become Parent Teacher Home Visits. He saw the organizing principles and the educational outcomes as inseparable. 

His own words say it better than I can: “The central lesson I learned was that real change comes when people come together with shared hopes and dreams. Organizing means building something from the inside out. Good people can make almost any system work. I have spent my life working within the system to make change.” 

I think about where Parent Teacher Home Visits is today, operating in more than 700 schools across 32 states and Washington, D.C., now reaching into Canada. None of it would exist without the groundwork laid by Howard’s own hands. My deepest condolences go to his wife, Cynthia, who was also an ACT leader and who understood this work from the inside. They helped us build something profound together. Many of us are still standing on it. 

Rest well, Howard. 

Yesenia Ramirez is cofounder and senior advisor of Parent Teacher Home Visits.