Community Conversation on Hispanic Education

Posted by on August 24, 2009

WHITE HOUSE COMMUNITY CONVERSATION ON HISPANIC EDUCATION TO BE HELD AT COMMUNITY COLLEGE OF PHILADELPHIA ON SEPT. 1, 2009

Juan Sepúlveda, executive director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans, in collaboration with Stephen M. Curtis, president of Community College of Philadelphia, will hold a White House Initiative community conversation from 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., and from 12:45 p.m. to 2:15 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 1 in Room S2-19 in the Winnet Building at Community College of Philadelphia.

The College’s Winnet Student Life Building is located on the west side of 17th Street, between Spring Garden Street and Callowhill Street. Room S2-19 is on the second floor.

The community conversation will provide an opportunity for Latino business and community leaders, faith-based organizations, parents, students, faculty and others to voice their thoughts on two questions: 1) How Latino education attainment can and should be improved?; and 2) What the White House Initiative should be doing to improve Latino education attainment? Space is limited. Those wishing to participate must RSVP by calling 215-751-8861 no later than Aug. 31.

The information gleaned from the conversations will be recorded and collected and will serve as the foundation for a new presidential executive order that will govern the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans.

Sepúlveda is holding community conversations in Pennsylvania and many other states between July and the end of September to hear community suggestions and ideas. The White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans was created by executive order on Sept. 24, 1990 to improve federal efforts to promote quality education for Hispanic Americans.

“Education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success, it is a prerequisite for success,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. “My hope is that Juan Sepúlveda helps us connect more closely to the Hispanic community and understand the challenges families face, so we are better able to provide clear paths to college and careers.”

Sepúlveda was appointed by Duncan on May 19, 2009, to the position of director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans. He is responsible for directing the efforts of the White House Initiative in engaging Hispanic students, parents, families, organizations and anyone working in or with the education system in communities nationwide as active participants in improving the academic achievement of Hispanic Americans.

For the last 20 years, Sepúlveda has been a senior executive, strategist and advocate in the nonprofit and philanthropic communities, with a focus in community development, capacity building and transformational management. Prior to assuming his current position at the Department, Sepúlveda was president of The Common Enterprise (TCE), which he founded in 1995 as an outgrowth of a national Rockefeller Foundation initiative to help build stronger communities across America by making nonprofits, philanthropic organizations, governments, businesses and communities more effective as they tackled significant critical social issues in more than 35 states and nationally.

Having grown up in a working class Mexican-American neighborhood in Topeka, Kan., Sepúlveda has been involved in community organizing and politics since the age of 16, when he was the first high school student hired to work for the Kansas Secretary of State.