Our story is very much connected to our founder’s story, Dr. Alfredo Carlos. Dr. Carlos was born in Mexico and was brought to the U.S. as a child. His parents Alfredo Sr. and Eva worked as a retail clerk and sewing machine operator and they both along with his sisters instilled in him the importance of education. Growing up in a working class immigrant barrio in the Harbor Area of Los Angeles imparted in him a yearning to understand poverty, discrimination and inequality. These very things he experienced growing up are what drove his intellectual curiosity. He attended University of California, Santa Barbara and majored in History and Chicano Studies focusing on working class history, social movements and community organizing. He became involved in organizations seeking social and economic justice and began working with youth of color in after school programs.

While Dr. Carlos loved the work he was doing helping individuals, he also felt that structurally he was not having an impact. He also realized that much of the work he did with the organizations he was involved in (the Living Wage Coalition, La Casa de La Raza, the Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse in Santa Barbara, United FarmWorkers in Oxnard) was great work, but it wasn’t dealing with developing an economy that empowers people rather than making them powerless. It was around this time that he began to question how he could go about creating change in a way to enact a positive vision of the world. This is when he decided to go to graduate school to study alternative economic models that empower working communities.     Read More...