Progreso Latino Fund Advisory Committee Spotlight: Vice Chair Gypsy Garcia

After four years of volunteering for the Progreso Latino Fund, and serving on the advisory committee for the last two, Gypsy Garcia is now stepping into the role of Vice Chair. Garcia has brought energy and expertise to the Fund’s work, and played an integral role as Special Events Chair during the Fund’s 20th Anniversary year.

Garcia is a professional coach and Associate Director of Learning Design for Executive Education at the Yale School of Management. Her career is anchored by expertise in instructional design and facilitation. At Yale, she collaborates with faculty and client partners to create learning and development programs for professionals across the lifespan. Garcia is also Secretary of the Board of Directors for the International Festival of Arts and Ideas.

She is a proud immigrant from the Dominican Republic and is fluent in Spanish. Garcia holds a Bachelor of Science in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences from Boston University. She deeply values learning about the world through stories as a reader, writer and listener.

When did you first hear about the Progresso Latino Fund, and how did you get involved?

I was approached by a colleague who was on the advisory committee at the time in early 2022, when we were still coming out of the pandemic. I have learned, especially now being on the advisory committee, we do a lot of one-to-one recruitment where advisory committee members currently on the committee will offer recommendations for The Community Foundation to consider an approach for service on the committee, and so I think that's what was happening at that time. I was the only other Latina she knew at the school, and thought I might be interested in hearing about the work and joining the committee – and I was.

So I submitted my information to The Community Foundation, and eventually heard back from Liana Garcia. We had a really great conversation, and I learned more about the work. I was excited. My focus at the time was to try and find more avenues for service in the community. I have been a longtime Connecticut resident. I moved from the Dominican Republic to Norwalk and then West Haven. I've always been on the shoreline, and I didn't do any service or advocacy or volunteer work until 2022, when I finally was in a place where I could pour back into my community, and this felt like a really good opportunity to do that. And really, that conversation with Liana, it changed the trajectory of my career entirely – and I don't say that lightly. The door that was opened to me through the Progresso Latino Fund advanced my leadership capacity; it created stronger, more impactful and more meaningful ties to my community; it led me to my work with the International Festival of Arts and Ideas; and now with United in Solidarity for New Haven (US4NH), who helped co-sponsor the ¡Taíno Vive! event hosted at the Peabody Museum in April. All these folks that are now richly embedded into my life – they're there because of the Progreso Latino Fund.

Can you say more about the leadership capacity that you got to explore? How did that lead to this new position as Vice Chair?

Something that has always been true to me, and that I have learned is that leadership shows up in a thousand different ways: you're a leader when you’re managing the logistics of the registration table for our event; you are a leader if you're the person switching slides over for the panelists. There are all these different ways that people come in and volunteer their time and their expertise and their skills to contribute to the community. For me, I had a very white supremacist understanding of leadership that was very individualistic. It was very much about: “what can I do, what have I earned and what have I learned that can qualify what I bring to the table?” That quickly was turned upside down through my work because for me, I'm a servant leader. I’ve said almost every meeting when there's an opportunity to get more involved: I'm someone who rolls my sleeves up and gets to work. I don't like having a leadership title for the sake of having the title, so just being on committee for me was not the accomplishment; the accomplishment was in the practice of living the work and doing the work.

I think I always knew that, but my experience with the Progreso Latino Fund added shape to that feeling– and in contrast to what I had experienced in other spaces, made it very clear that that's the kind of collective leadership I prefer. So I continued rolling up my sleeves, getting involved whenever there was a chance to contribute to an event, to lead a committee, attend donor receptions, or panel talks hosted by the Community Fund for Women & Girls or the Basic Needs Fund. I would raise my hand. I've been brought into ad hoc committees here and there because of my engagement and active involvement, and so as I continued doing that, folks would remember my name because I'd show up, and that built trust in the community, and that trust that I was building is what led me to these other leadership opportunities.

What does the vice chair role mean to you? What do you envision looking ahead?

I feel privileged, and I feel a massive responsibility taking on this title because it is the first time we are formally instating the Vice Chair role. To me, this is a mark of progress of where Progreso Latino Fund is now relative to how we began. We had not had enough advisory committee members, enough of diversity of leadership across different skills, to be able to have multiple committees focus on different components of our strategy, all of which we are now able to do. We had this wonderful 20th Anniversary year that's only continued with its momentum, and we're now in a place where we have over $500,000 available and ready to continue impacting our community. For me, what this signals is not a change in direction, but a deeper commitment to what we've already been doing, because we are future planning; because we're so confident that in three years, in five years, in seven years, in ten years, we're going to still be growing at the pace that we are. That requires us to have all the components of our leadership structure defined and filled, and transitioning in a way that serves us and our growth and our momentum.

What is one high point or closely-held memory from your time on the Progresso Latino Fund thus far?

Our 20th Anniversary year was my second time serving as Special Events Chair, and it was a privilege for me to be able to steward our programming that year because of how important it was for us to reach our goal of having at least 20 funds established. Coming to that gala having accomplished and exceeded that goal was really special. It was well attended, not just by folks who typically come to our events, but by a broad representation of folks from throughout the Greater New Haven community. That was really meaningful because that signaled where our momentum was headed; we are now moving beyond figuring out a way to just serve our community. We are now doing so well that folks want to contribute to the conversation that might not have thought of us before, and that spirit has continued and has led to what's happening this year.

For example, the Hispanic Heritage Month theme is "Unidos Somos Mas" or "Together We're More,” and that's something that Progresso Latino Fund is really wanting to live and breathe in the work that we do. We serve the Latine community, and the only way that we can serve Latines is by finding a way to connect who we are to the broader New Haven community and to the 20-town region that The Community Foundation serves. We can only serve ourselves if we're also serving everyone else. We're all facing the same systemic issues, and we’re asking what we can do to lead others and create alignment so that we're sharing resources and creating a broader impact that uplifts everyone. We're focused on our Latine community because that's who we know, that's who we are, that's who we serve, and our belief is that to do that and build that capacity, we need to bring other folks into the conversation.