Yauco to Chicago,
first in the family,
never the last.
How I got here, and why I work the way I do. In April 2026 my colleagues elected me Vice President of the Chicago Board of Education — a Clemente graduate now helping govern the district that educated him, and is educating his son.
Chicago, Illinois
The story
I am an Afro-Puerto Rican man, born and raised in Yauco, Puerto Rico, and shaped by a low-income upbringing between the island and Chicago. That is not background material. It is the reason I read policy the way I do.
I graduated from Roberto Clemente Community Academy in Humboldt Park, a Chicago public school. I started college at Wilbur Wright College, part of the City Colleges of Chicago, and became the first person in my family to earn a degree. I kept going: a bachelor’s in Justice Studies and a master’s in Higher Education Leadership from Northeastern Illinois University, a Ph.D. in Education Policy, Organization and Leadership from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, concentrating in the History of Education — and, later, MBA studies through the Gies College of Business.
For six years I researched how racialized communities of color gain or lose access to higher education. For more than five, I taught ethnic studies and leadership courses. I served as associate director of diversity and inclusion at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.
That work grew into more than fifteen years of driving workforce strategy, leadership development, organizational effectiveness, and inclusive culture across corporate, public-sector, nonprofit, and higher education environments. Today I am a Lead Inclusion Consultant and Business People Partner at Cisco, advising leaders on enterprise-wide initiatives in leadership effectiveness, workforce development, organizational culture, and employee experience — including Horizon: Inclusive Leadership for the AI Era, an AI-powered toolkit that helps people leaders embed inclusive practices into everyday decision-making. I also co-founded Velez Advisory Partners to do that work on my own terms.
Alongside the corporate work, I serve as Vice President of the Chicago Board of Education, helping guide policy, strategy, and fiscal stewardship for the nation’s fourth-largest school district — more than 325,000 students and an annual budget exceeding $10 billion. On Juneteenth 2025 the Mayor appointed me to the Chicago Reparations Task Force, forty of us charged with defining what reparations mean in Chicago — across housing, policing, incarceration, education, health, and economic development — and building the city’s first Reparations Study. I live in West Englewood with my wife and son, who attends a Chicago public school.
I approach social and economic justice unapologetically. I also insist on evidence. As someone who teaches research design, I know that too much data becomes noise and too little becomes a wrong answer. Good governance needs both the conviction and the discipline.
It also means saying no to my own side sometimes. Being right about a goal does not make every method the right one, and I would rather take a hard conversation directly to the person who can act than win a point in public. If we unite, we can ask for more. If we stay divided, not a lot gets done.
I do this work in a lot of rooms — a corporate one, a university one, a city one, a governing one, and a kitchen table in West Englewood. The through line is the same in all of them: find who is being left out, find out why, and change the thing that is doing it.
