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the good fight

Antonia Hernández might have moved from MALDEF to the California Community Foundation, but she is still a leader in the business of social change.

By Frank O. Sotomayor

The setting sun transmitted a rosy glow across the evening sky, and specks of light began to flicker from the foothills and flatlands of Los Angeles. From her 34th-floor downtown office, Antonia Hernández takes in the view and talks about her role in the city and county she loves—one of the most diverse, dynamic and challenging in the world.
“I’m a businesswoman and I’m in the business of social change,” says Hernández, who left the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 2004 to become president and CEO of the California Community Foundation (CCF). “I saw MALDEF as a vehicle to undertake social change, to improve the quality of the life of people. CCF is another vehicle to do the same thing ... using different tools.”
Hernández and her CCF colleagues give approximately $20 million a year to local programs and distribute a much greater amount in donor-designated grants for specific purposes. Hernández’ position represents both an opportunity and a challenge for her: how to best advance the civic agenda for Los Angeles County, a region known for its glamour and affluence, but one that’s also saddled with poverty, homelessness and faltering public schools.
Working under the concept of “Many Communities, One Los Angeles,” Hernández leads a staff of 53 who operate in the nation’s most populous county—a region of 10 million people with immense economic, cultural and social diversity. Her constituency is the entire community, but Latinos represent the largest ethnic chunk with half of the county’s population and three-fourths of the students in the L.A. Unified School District. More than a third of the people are—like her—immigrants and Hernández funds programs to integrate Latinos, Koreans, Armenians and many others into L.A.’s civic life.
Hernández, 59, is one of only a half-dozen Hispanics to head a major U.S. philanthropic foundation. Her leadership style reflects her strong personality: she is strategic-minded, passionate, determined and forceful.
“Antonia is a very enthusiastic person, a morale builder, very inclusive,” says Los Angeles private equity investor Luis Nogales, a former MALDEF board chair. “When she calls, people listen. She is good at enlisting people for the greater good.”
“She is the most astute reader of people I’ve ever come across,” says Linda Wong, a CCF vice president who also worked with Hernández at MALDEF. “She understands people, and she uses that understanding to motivate people.”
Tackling projects with her characteristic zeal, Hernández and her colleagues have developed a 10-year strategic plan to focus discretionary funding on housing and neighborhood revitalization, accessible health care, quality education, arts and human services. The foundation for the first time took a position on a voter initiative by supporting a housing bond, and it operates an innovative housing program to make home ownership more affordable.
Founded in 1915, CCF became an independent foundation 25 years ago. In three short years, Hernández has taken CCF to a higher level of civic involvement and its assets have doubled—from $550 million to $1.1 billion.
“My job is connecting people with a good heart and money to the people who need what money can bring,” Hernández says. That can mean helping a community clinic or charter school, supporting a young artist, or hundreds of other projects. “It’s really very rewarding.”
Last year, she was the recipient of a very unexpected reward. Standing outside a church after Good Friday services, she screamed joyfully when she got good news via her cell phone. CCF, she was informed, had been named beneficiary of a mega-donation—$200 million—from the estate of a Los Angeles philanthropist.
“I started yelling and screaming,” Hernández recalls with a hearty laugh. “People must have thought I had gone mad.”
The donation, from the late Joan Palevsky, a Los Angeles advocate of social justice, has enabled CCF to double its discretionary funding to $20 million a year. (CCF also administers 1,400 funds set up by individuals and companies for specific purposes, ranging from college scholarships to pet neutering. Together these funds distributed $238 million in the last fiscal year to local, national and international projects.) Through her work at MALDEF, Hernández knew Palevsky but acknowledges that the donation was designated to CCF before she took over. “It’s a wonderful blessing,” Hernández says.
There have been many blessings for Hernández—along with hardships and struggles—in a personal journey that began in a humble Mexican communal ranch in the northern state of Coahuila. The ranch was named El Cambio, meaning change, seemingly predicting Hernández’s future passion for social change. When she was 8 years old, her father—a U.S. citizen whose parents had been repatriated to Mexico in the 1930s—moved the family to the Maravilla housing projects in East L.A. in the mid-1950s. The oldest of six children, she supplemented the family’s modest income by selling tamales and picking peaches, tomatoes and other crops in the farmlands of Central California.
“Even when we did migrant work, it was family work—we made it fun,” she says. During the school year, “my family always focused us on education. During the summer, we really worked hard in the fields and then went to Mexico” to visit relatives.
She began school not knowing English, but she soon excelled academically, propelled by her love of reading. “My mother would send me to sweep,” she says, “and when she heard no movement, she’d go look for me—in the closet, where I’d be reading.”
Showing her trademark determination, Hernández won scholarships, worked part time and prepared for a career in teaching before deciding to study law at UCLA. She earned her law degree in 1974, passed the bar exam and took her naturalization oath as a U.S. citizen.
After working as an attorney with L.A. legal assistance organizations, Hernández became staff counsel to the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee. In 1981, she joined MALDEF as regional counsel in Washington and became president and general counsel in 1985. In this period, MALDEF lobbied to make amnesty part of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized the immigration status of millions.
During Hernández’ 18-year tenure as president, MALDEF won landmark legal victories, including a Texas case to equalize the funding of public education. In 1994, MALDEF helped block implementation of California’s Proposition 187, which would have barred undocumented immigrants from public schools and health centers. MALDEF also helped change the political landscape by leading redistricting efforts that resulted in the election of more Hispanic officeholders —from California to Chicago, where Luis Gutierrez was elected to Congress.
She successfully mentored several MALDEF staff members who have achieved notable success, including Arturo Vargas, executive director of NALEO, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.
“She was an incredibly hard worker, and I learned from her modeling,” Vargas says. “She conveyed trust in me and provided advice on such matters as fundraising.”
Hernández says her parents encouraged an interest in social activism and she gained a “sense of obligation to do the public good.” The family remains close-knit; her parents live across the street from her in Pasadena. Hernández met her husband, Michael Stern, a Superior Court judge, when they both worked for California Rural Legal Assistance in the mid-1970s. She proudly recites achievements of their three children: Benjamin graduated from Stanford Law School, Marisa attends UCLA law school and Michael is an undergraduate at Brown University.
Just as education allowed her to move from poverty to success, Hernández sees education as the key for young people today. She says philanthropy can help at the edges in this field, but that the main responsibility for educational funding must come from government.
With stable, well-paying manufacturing jobs becoming increasingly rare, Hernández preaches that a college education is vital for Latinos across the U.S. “Latinos are hard workers but we have to work smart,” she says. “If we do not educate our kids, we can grow [as a population], but we will be at the bottom of the economic ladder.”
For social activist Antonia Hernández, that situation is not acceptable. In Los Angeles, her foundation finances programs for early childhood education, literacy programs and parental involvement. On a policy level, Hernández “strategically nudges” education officials for better schools. On a practical level, she urges parents everywhere to be active in their children’s schools, to vote in local and national elections and to “clear the table” so their sons and daughters are encouraged to do their homework.
Hernández wants to instill in parents and the entire community “that thirst, that hunger, that obsession to educate our children.” There is no greater challenge, she says, concluding: “Our kids are our future.”