I grew up in the barrio of Chino, California. The city was divided into two communities, separated by Riverside Drive. To the south of Riverside was poor Mexican and to the north of Riverside was middle-class white. We struggled financially and socially. One of my earliest memories as a child was overhearing my parents talking about the discrimination they faced and a pejorative they often heard. I didn’t understand what that racial slur meant, but I understood that there were people who thought of us as “less than.”

My family didn’t have a lot of money, and it wasn’t until my mom, in her 50s, went to college and later became a teacher that we started to have more opportunities as a family. There were lots of school workers in my family, however. My mom started as a cafeteria worker, but we had custodians, school secretaries, and aides. My whole family placed a lot of value on public education and what it could do to help you move forward in life.

At the same time, there were numerous attempts to integrate the schools, and in second grade, I started getting bused across town to the white, middle-class school. I experienced a lot of trauma and bullying, with racist comments thrown at me by other seven-year-olds. That school, however, had better facilities, more experienced teachers, more programs, more recreation—more of everything. I suddenly found myself in a whole new world.

It’s impossible to say what my life would have been like today if I had stayed in my neighborhood school, but I’m the youngest of six kids in my family. It was just the two youngest of us who were bused, and it was just the two of us who went to college. I figured out pretty early in life that I wasn’t smarter or more deserving than my older siblings; I just had access to a different kind of education than they did. That experience deepened my respect for the power of education. Although I would start my career as an MBA, I always had it in the back of my mind that once I had a successful business career, I would go back to school and become a teacher. The call toward education would take unexpected turns, but I was drawn by the experience of knowing that there are so many brilliant children everywhere who simply don’t have the kind of education they need to express it. I felt compelled to try to do something about that.

A chance meeting in Oakland got me involved in community organizing. I had started my Ph.D. program in Social and Cultural Studies in Education at UC Berkeley, and I more deeply understood how our lived experiences were shaped by bigger systemic decisions. In this meeting, community members were trying to bring afterschool programming to their middle schools. I intended to sit quietly in the back corner and listen, but I wound up on a bigger career trajectory than I ever imagined. And it led me to Sacramento, where a group of neighbors were coming together to make a difference on behalf of their children. It was the very earliest of days of what would become the Parent Teacher Home Visits Project. I studied under Jim Keddy and started working with Sacramento ACT, the organizing entity that launched PTHV.

Teachers were just beginning to get trained on how to conduct home visits, which were based on the organizing principle of one-on-one meetings. As an organizer, my job was to do 20 of these meetings each week to build bridges between the community and the institutions that served it. I went along with the superintendent of Sacramento schools to translate. That was a very profound experience because for the first time, the superintendent—the most powerful person in the school district—was hearing directly from families who were struggling. He was face-to-face with families who didn’t make a lot of money. They were renting and could barely afford their rent. He was hearing from immigrant families who lived in fear of deportation every day.

But what he heard and what I heard was that every single family we visited wanted the absolute best for their children. And they hoped the schools would be the vehicle for that, just like my family did. But the reality was, the schools, in many ways, weren’t living up to that hope. I also saw those first home-visiting educators have the courage to jump into something brand new in the district. They were so nervous and afraid, but each one came out of a visit saying how incredibly powerful and transformational the experience was.

PTHV had launched, and my organizing career took me elsewhere briefly, but I stayed in close contact and even came back every so often to hear how things were progressing. When PTHV had spun off and become a separate organization from Sacramento ACT, I did a little consulting and eventually came back as the organization’s executive director.

For me, PTHV was like magic. People you wouldn’t expect to even know each other came together and rolled up their sleeves, and they created something out of nothing. That “can do” energy draws me in closer every day, and even though we haven’t always had very much in terms of resources as an organization, we manage to attract the most wonderful people who work so hard to live out our mission.

Fundamentally, the added value that Parent Teacher Home Visits brings to the field has to do with changing people and their mindsets. It does something to people. It breaks down barriers. It increases connection between people. It increases people’s confidence in reaching out to each other for help. We heard that over and over when the pandemic hit. So many educators told us that their home visits before the pandemic made such a huge difference when all of us suddenly had this crisis on our hands. We saw families were reaching out to educators, and educators were reaching out to families—because they cared about each other. That’s it. That care leads to all kinds of other things.

Parent Teacher Home Visits also translates into changing school culture and climate. We don’t talk about that very much; we tend to focus more on other academic outcomes, which are super important. However, those academic outcomes happen because of that strong, connective tissue at the heart of the home visit. Education advocates talk a lot about reform and changing things in school, but we’re not paying enough attention to the foundation of what it means for a school to be a community of people who care about each other. That is where PTHV’s impact is most felt.

A long time ago, we started to do some of the initial research that provides our evidence base because of the stories people were sharing. For example, we saw graduation rates start to increase at Luther Burbank High School after home visits began. The research then confirmed what we were hearing from families and teachers. And it’s always been that way. Home visits start, changes happen, and research confirms the connection. This model, which is grounded in building relationships of trust, is what makes the difference—in academic outcomes for children, in reducing chronic absence rates, in connecting educators to their sense of professional purpose, and in helping families feel more confident and connected to schools.

And there’s work to be done to systemize this practice. I’m always thinking about ways to connect this practice that happens between two educators and a family to the larger systems they are a part of. That is the challenge: how to get at the root causes within these big systems, that for so long, have been entrenched in behaviors and practices and mindsets that don’t always serve our most vulnerable children and families. Being able to point to individual and broader outcomes where home visits are implemented systematically is key. Home visits make a difference at the whole school, not just for the individuals who had the home visit. Our work now is to develop ways to integrate this practice into some of the bigger strategies that schools have, as a way of attempting bolder, systemic change.

My hope and dream for the future of Parent Teacher Home Visits is that we never lose that sense of grassroots organizing, and wherever home visits are practiced, there is some connection to the community. At the same time, we want to continue our growth. Who would have thought this little nugget of a thing would become an international organization? I always say I want every single student in this country, and now maybe the world, to receive a Parent Teacher Home Visit in every grade from PreK through 12^th. The numbers aren’t the whole story, though. It has to be a high-quality home visit that is practiced with fidelity to the model. We are making such great headway in providing the kind of support that enables schools and districts to practice this model to realize those highest impacts for students, families, and teachers. That system of support we’re building out is critical to the long-term success of this practice. I believe our work is fundamentally changing what schools mean to communities as much as it is changing the experience of teaching and learning.