Podcast: Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights with Hank Smith
Season 3 Episode 6 Title: Knowledge Is Power: The Importance of Educational Pathways and Continuous Learning 

Episode Transcript:

00:05 Maxine Cuffe

You’re listening to Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights with Hank Smith, a podcast by the Haverford Trust Company. On Speaking of Quality, Hank chats with authors, influencers and wealth management experts to bring a sense of clarity and calm to the complexity and stress of personal finance. And now, here’s your host, Hank Smith.

00:26 Hank Smith  

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights. I’m your host, Hank Smith, Director and Head of Investment Strategy at The Haverford Trust Company. On this podcast, we explore topics ranging from quality investing, retirement resilience, stock market trends, estate planning, small business ownership, behavioral psychology, and more.

Today, I have Farah Jimenez in the booth with me. Farah is the President and CEO of the Philadelphia Education Fund. Farah is well-known in the Philadelphia area for her public speaking and commenting on important issues including race, civics, politics, urban issues and poverty. She recently spoke at Haverford Trust’s Sspeaker Sseries for Wwomen.

Thanks for joining me, Farah.

1:15 Farah Jimenez

I am happy to be here, thank you so much.

1:16 Hank Smith

Let’s start at the beginning when your parents immigrated from Cuba, fleeing the regime of Fidel Castro and later settled in New Jersey. Can you tell us a little bit about that story and, further, how your parents shaped who you are today?

1:33 Farah Jimenez

One of the ongoing family stories from when we, my sister and I, were growing up was that escape from Cuba. My parents talk about it as a commitment that they had to raise their children in their faith as Christians. They were concerned that Fidel Castro had come into power stating that he would now have a secular government and would ban religious practice. That was upsetting to my parents, and they wanted to leave.

My father was being threatened daily, when he would go to college, by patriots and supporters of Fidel Castro. It got to a point where his father, one of his last statements before he died, said to him, “You need to leave with your wife, because I’m afraid you’ll be killed.” They managed to be able to depart from Cuba on a flight, and what my parents would tell us and remind us is that when they left Cuba, the only things that they could take with them were each other, my sister who was in my mother’s belly at the time, and their education.  

2:38 Hank Smith

Farah, can you tell us why you’re so passionate about serving your community?

02:43 Farah Jimenez 

It’s because of my family’s origin story. It’s a recognition that when they arrived, there were limits on what they could do. Yes, they had their education, but my father and my mother spoke very limited English. My mother had not completed her medical degree and made huge sacrifices to be able to do that. My father worked hard labor, paving highways and roads, even though he was trained as a civil engineer. My mother had to live in Spain apart from him, so she could complete her education in a language that she knew. At the time that they were separated, my mother was with two kids under two years of age trying to complete her medical degree. It’s hard to even contemplate. I remember asking her, “How did she do it?” and she said, “Truthfully Farah, I don’t know, it had to be done, so I did it.”

That was true for my father, it had to be done. He did what was needed in order to support the family. Recognizing that individuals have value, have ability to contribute to society, and that sometimes they fall on hard times. I’ve always just felt passionate about trying to support the ability of people to get to their fullest potential, in whatever form that is.

3:58 Hank Smith

At the beginning of your career, you were a consultant with the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development and later oversaw a number of community development projects including the transformation of Germantown Avenue in Philadelphia’s Mount Airy neighborhood. What drew you to that area of work and then the transition from community development to education later in your career?

4:22 Farah Jimenez

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, there was a huge explosion of street homelessness, and that motivated me to get involved in helping to solve that problem as best I could. I ran a free meals program on campus and got very involved in affordable housing initiatives and attempts to address homelessness. I interned after college with the National Low Income Housing Coalition and from there got tapped to work with this consulting group that was supporting HUD.

I think the idea of the fact that housing instability is a problem that can be addressed and solved with the right investments was something that I got very passionate about, because homelessness is a result of not being able to afford your housing. If we don’t have enough affordable housing that’s in line with what people can earn, it’s very difficult obviously for people to house themselves.

When I left HUD, I ended up coming back to the University of Pennsylvania for law school, but I was still really bit by the bug about community development. I ended up working for a consulting firm based in Connecticut and then later in Philadelphia that was consulting with a lot of groups around affordable housing development and neighborhood revitalization, including our client, the University of Pennsylvania and their robust revitalization in West Philadelphia. That’s when I got recruited to run this community-based organization, Mt. Airy USA. I was at the time looking to leave the community builders where I was working and I was offered two jobs, one at a very established developer of affordable housing in Philadelphia and the other at this startup, $80,000 a year budget nonprofit with one full-time employee and 27 board members. I remember asking all my advisors, “What should I do? Should I take the established organization, or should I go to this little startup nonprofit?” 

They all said I should go to the established organization. That’s when I decided I would go to the startup nonprofit because I figured I couldn’t make it any worse. I know it wasn’t well established, but it would give me a chance to test my muscle and my ability to lead, and I ended up accepting the role at Mt. Airy USA. They hired me because I had affordable housing experience. I could tell from that neighborhood, when I did a bit of a strategic analysis of what was needed, that all of the housing blight was located off the neighborhood Main Street. I convinced the board that we should do a commercial corridor revitalization strategy as our primary strategy, and it really ended up taking off. I’m going to simplify it; make it seem like it was a snap of the fingers. It really wasn’t, but a lot of people contributed, bought into that vision, put their backs behind that vision and their financial resources, and we were able to really help spur some revitalization. Finally, the housing values right off Germantown Avenue improved. 

7:25 Hank Smith 

That’s a fantastic, success story. Why don’t we accelerate to where you are today? Let’s talk about your work as head of the Philadelphia Education Fund, you’re doing some remarkable things in giving Philadelphia students access to higher education. In fact, the PEF scholarship program has awarded more than $20 million in needs-based financial assistance to more than 3,000 college-going students over the past 25 years. Can you give us a little bit of the history of the Philadelphia Education Fund and the work you’re doing today? 

8:02 Farah Jimenez 

The Philadelphia Education Fund was founded in the mid-1980s, and it was developed through a collaborative effort between some business leaders and educators who were distressed at the level and quality of math education in Philadelphia and humanities education.

That origin story of collaboration continues for us today. We run a lot of collective impact strategies, and some are focused on increasing the number of students who are accessing high quality STEM education at the secondary and post-secondary level. Also, now we have a program called the College Access and Success Ecosystem, which is trying to leverage the fact that we have almost 300 nonprofits who are doing some form of college advising for Philadelphia students, but we’re all doing them independently. We explore what we can do if we work collaboratively to accelerate gains for our students. 

In terms of the work that we do, it’s primarily focused on providing students from middle grades through college with college and career advising supports. That can take the form of career exploration, trying to figure out what you might be interested in when you’re in middle grades. Then when you’re in high school, doing the preparation to apply and submit and prepare yourself for success in college. Then when you’re in college, the financial support, as you mentioned, our Philadelphia Scholar Scholarship as well as continued persistence in advising to help our students successfully complete college.

We’re proud of the fact that we work with intention in our lowest performing high schools in Philadelphia. The reason we’ve selected those schools is because there are many programs that support high performing young people who are attending rigorous programs, but we want to make sure we’re hitting those students who don’t realize that college is an option for them. They don’t realize some form of post-secondary preparation is going to be required for almost every career that they want, including if they want to work in the trades, and we want to work with students for whom going after school, getting themselves to a secondary place is difficult. All of our work is embedded right in the school buildings during the school days, so that the students don’t have to take extra action to access it.

10:18 Hank Smith 

You mentioned trade schools, which don’t get enough publicity. They don’t get enough recommendations to high schoolers and they’re critical. Whether it’s plumbing, whether it’s HVAC, electric, they’re not going away with artificial intelligence, they’re not going away with some magical technology and they’re very high paying. If you have some business acumen, it can lead to a very lucrative career.

10:52 Farah Jimenez

Those trade jobs are incredible. We have a program during the summer we call Scholars Advantage, and it provides students with an earn to learn experience. Many of our students have to choose during the summer to actually make money, and so we help them make money, but they’re in an academic program in a classroom led by a certified educator. Then we have career field trips that are associated with it. One of the career tracks that we have is trades and skill trades, so we have the union members and union representatives come out and speak to our students. It’s interesting because I think sometimes the unions solicit the interest of young people and encourage them, but they diminish what’s really required of them to be successful in the trades. We’d like them to talk about the rigors.

If you’re going to join the trades, you do actually have to pass a test to enter, and that test is not arithmetic. That test is algebra and geometry, and you have to understand some elements of chemistry and physics. Our young people have an opportunity to understand that it’s not just “do you have the strength to sling a hammer.” You have to have some fundamental education that comes out of your secondary program in order to prepare yourself for success in the skilled trades, so I’m hoping that that message permeates.

I’ll also add just one other simple statement, which a lot of individuals who don’t live in Philadelphia might not realize, a lot of Philadelphia students don’t get driver’s licenses and one of the requirements for an opportunity with the skilled trade is a driver’s license. What I’m happy to share is, I understand the School District of Philadelphia is looking to bring back driver’s education and that will present huge opportunities for our young people who aren’t interested in going to college but are interested in the trade.

12:46 Hank Smith

That’s interesting, so it seems some other form of picture ID doesn’t substitute for a driver’s license?

12:53 Farah Jimenez

The main reason they require the driver’s license is because they actually want you to be able to drive. Many of the jobs that are available, they can assign you anywhere.  The second part of it, which is a harder challenge of course, is you have to have your own transportation. But let’s tackle the first one, let’s make sure they get that driver’s license.

13:13 Hank Smith

Farah, you mentioned that the Philadelphia Education Fund was founded by some corporate leaders. Is your support today primarily from corporations or do you also get support from individuals and the government as well?

13:33 Farah Jimenez

We’re largely funded by government, a lot of it is federal funding, some state and some local. I would say next to that is a consulting practice. When I arrived at the Philadelphia Education Fund, one of the realities of getting a lot of government funding is you also don’t get a lot of support for your core operations. Most government funding restricts how much can be used for general operations and that’s a problem because you still need to have the lights on, you still need to get yourself to the school sites, you need to buy paper, et cetera.

Recognizing the pressure that we would get if we wanted to expand our reach through more government funding, I launched a consulting practice. We have a lot of clients that are for-profits who hire us to provide bespoke curriculum connected to their area of practice. We have a few energy companies that we’ve been contracted by to develop curriculum and then teach teachers on how to deliver career connected curriculum related to their industry, so it offers some industry exposure.

We have school districts that have hired us and some other nonprofits that have hired us to be the back-office administrator of some of their summer programs and provide college advising services. That’s been incredibly productive for us and mission aligned, which is wonderful.

Individual donors remains an area where we have a huge opportunity to grow. What’s interesting is that a pretty significant percentage of our donors come from these surrounding counties. Many of them have their own stories of being the first in their families to go to college and they found education to be transformative. They choose to live in districts where there’s a quality public education system for their kids and there’s a part of them that feels like they owe it to give back to communities where there are students who don’t have all those opportunities and don’t have the robust educational access. We’re really grateful to so many, and I’m sure some of them are your clients who give to organizations like ours to make sure young people in Philadelphia have a chance. 

15:48 Hank Smith 

Do you find yourself having a fundraising role in your job as president of the Philadelphia Education Fund or are there other colleagues that do that or maybe you just don’t do that at all? 

16:04 Farah Jimenez 

While my title is President, CEO, it really should be chief fundraiser because most of the roles when you’re a nonprofit leader – I haven’t met one yet that isn’t chiefly responsible for fundraising, even presidents of universities. It’s largely revenue generation. While I do some fundraising support, the grant writing and support donor cultivation, a lot of my role now is more business development, trying to identify those clients that will be interested in investing in our work because it’s of mutual benefit and therefore is a client that we can continue to support year over year. Foundation funding is terrific, but it’s not reliable, it’s not promised every year and sometimes they need to support other groups. In fact, there are some funders who will say, “We will fund you for two years and after that you have to take a year off.” So, what do you do in that year off? Clients are wonderful in that you can renew them so long as that need continues to exist and you’re doing fine work, so a lot of my work right now is business development. 

17:14 Hank Smith 

I would also imagine that marketing also relates to fundraising because, frankly, this is an incredible Philadelphia-based organization. I consider myself a Philadelphian even though I live in the suburbs, and I’d never heard of this fantastic organization. So, the more marketing, the more you can get your name out there, the better the chance you can grow and help more students. Speaking of that, are you dealing primarily with public schools versus charter schools?  

17:55 Farah Jimenez 

Our primary focus is on district-run public schools, and then we will also support charter public schools because they are serving the same population and are funded by the citizens of Philadelphia. Our focus is on the quality of the programs there. So, our focus is on schools that are struggling. There are incredible public schools in Philadelphia, that’s not where we go. We go to the ones where their graduation rate is below the average for the school district, where the college grant rates are significantly lower, because those are the populations that need the most investment and have the least attention and least opportunities. I will say we do work with some Catholic schools and have done some curriculum development for those schools as well as provided programming for those students, because there are many Catholic schools who also are serving similarly situated student bodies. We want to make sure these resources are available to those young people as well. 

18:54 Hank Smith

I have to ask you, what is your proudest accomplishment in your tenure at the Philadelphia Education Fund? 

19:03 Farah Jimenez 

Oh gosh, that is a big one. I was invited to lead the organization at a moment where it was at the precipice. And I remember the board chair at the time, as he was talking to me about the opportunity, he said, “You’ll lead us into a merger with another nonprofit or you’ll lead us into a new iteration of ourselves.” I love challenges, so I signed up for that, and I’m really proud that the organization is now on both sound., programmatic funding and has a clarity of purpose is growing. Not to mention, has incredibly talented staff.

In the first three years I was there, we were drawing on our line of credit to the fullest extent almost every month, and we have not needed to touch that and now have some reserves so that I can breathe a little bit lighter should we find ourselves in another COVID moment where we can keep the doors running. Maybe that leads to my proudest moment during COVID-19. I successfully led the organization through that period without needing any staff to reduce their work hours, to be furloughed, to be laid off. We were able to sustain all of our programs, pay all of our bills. I’m really proud of that, and we did not extend our line of credit. So that is probably the proudest moment, knowing that when the chips were down that I could lead the organization. 

20:33 Hank Smith 

That is quite an accomplishment to be proud of because so many organizations took a major time out. Congratulations. Listeners of our podcasts have heard me say this on many of the podcasts that I truly believe one of the secret sauces of what makes America the greatest country in the world is philanthropy. It isn’t just the Gates’ and the Buffet’s and the Rockefeller’s, it’s middle America, it’s lower-middle America, it’s the donating to churches, donating to community causes and organizations, and giving of their time. Farah, you truly embody this notion of philanthropy in terms of what you’re doing in the nonprofit space. I just think it is fantastic, and it really is what makes America special. 

21:39 Farah Jimenez 

Thank you so much for that and I would agree with you 100%. Having traveled the world and talked to nonprofits in other places, philanthropy is uniquely American. From the individual with just a few talents to their name to those with far more, people in the U.S. are often incredibly generous. 

22:00 Hank Smith 

I know that you lead by the mantra that education has the power to transform lives, and you also are a believer in lifelong learning. Tell us a little bit about what you mean by the mantra of education being able to transform lives. Do you have any strategies for our listeners that are interested in continuous learning? 

22:30 Farah Jimenez

I get to see it every day in our work at the Philadelphia Education Fund, how education transforms lives in the span of four years. We’ll see a young person who’s begun in our program, graduated and now is in college and they’re coming back as medical professionals, physical therapists, teachers. We know where they came from and we know the struggles that they had, and that this is transforming not just their futures but the futures of their children. We’ve been around for so long that we can see that with great clarity. Some of our alums are now sitting in the State House in leadership, some are attorneys, one is serving on our board, one who’s general counsel at a multinational organization, and one who graduated from our program and served under former Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney as his chief education officer. There are incredible arcs, and all those individuals will talk about how education and the opportunities that the Philadelphia Education Fund was able to provide transformed the direction of their lives. 

My parents are an example of it. I was raised by educated parents, so probably not as dramatically am I an example of it, but all of us can talk about how it opened up doors we could not have imagined for ourselves when we were younger in terms of lifelong learning. There’s so much to learn all the time, think about how technology changes all the time and what we had to learn during COVID. If somebody was not willing to be a lifelong learner during COVID, shame on them because there was a lot to be learned about medical treatments and technology. We all had to learn how to do things digitally and virtually. We all had to learn how to take care of ourselves in a new environment with the health conditions that we were all living under.

There are lots of ways to do lifelong learning. There are incredible programs like Coursera and others that are available that offer educational programs on an ongoing basis. There are podcasts like this that are incredible opportunities to continue learning from other people or from experts in fields, and great books to read and lectures to go to. I do all of those things all the time. I find learning really enriching and it frankly makes you more interesting, too. I would encourage people to continue to access all of the free resources available to them. 

25:17 Hank Smith 

It leads to just one more question, Farah, that you’re right. Technology has just made it so much easier to gain access to knowledge, but it’s also made it easier to get fake news, if you will.  How do you decipher between what is fact, what is opinion and what is BS, for lack of better word? 

25:46 Farah Jimenez 

I have a memory once of being very young and I was reading two different accounts of the same historical moment. I remember turning to the professor at the time, and I said, “I don’t know which one’s real.” And he’s like, “Well, sometimes it’s in the middle.” It’s a little bit of an understatement. Early on, I realized you have to use your own discernment at some point and try to access as many resources as possible. I think in this current environment, having a very rich and diverse diet of media and sources is important, and doing the extra work of going beyond the headline. The headline doesn’t tell you everything. The headline is to get you to read the article, but oftentimes the headlines are misleading. They’re not actually accurate when you’re reading the full story, if you bother to go past the first few paragraphs. I work very hard at having a diversity of podcasts that I’m listening to. 

I prefer ones where they’re not leaning in one direction or the other, but they have panels that are arguing with each other, so that I’m challenged because I’m hearing different perspectives of the same story and challenged to think about where I sit and where I land. I think it requires a lot more work than in the past. Maybe we were naive and maybe we should have been doing the work I’m now encouraging people to do. In the past, we just trusted Walter Conkrite, so we just assumed everything he was saying was factually true and without error. I think we need to challenge ourselves to put ourselves in situations where we must listen to voices and opinions that anger us, frustrate us, drive us crazy, but they inform us as to how the people look at the world. 

27:31 Hank Smith 

I know exactly what you’re talking about. I do it daily by reading, almost cover to cover, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. You’re right, there is a gray area. It isn’t always clear and sometimes there’s interpretation that it’s just not black and white.

27:56 Farah Jimenez 

I’ll say one thing, which was a big lesson during the COVID-19 period, which I hope people take. There were moments during COVID, and my mom is a doctor, so I was very much interested in the medical issues surrounding it, where I remember thinking, “Okay, why are they saying trust the science?” When we all know science evolves, it’s a learning process. It’s constantly shifting. It gets more information, then thinking evolves. It’s constant iteration, it’s based on hypotheses that get tested. This idea that something is firmly rooted and not malleable is where we get in trouble. 

I think there are opinions that change, there is learning that we get, and I wished during the COVID period that we had used that as a moment to educate Americans about what science really is. It’s constant investigation. We know more later than we knew before, and we don’t know everything. So that’s my main takeaway from COVID and I hope that people gain that as well, that when they’re reading the news or listening to scientists that they’re questioning and recognizing that we may not know everything right now. 

29:16 Hank Smith 

Well, let’s leave it at that and I could not agree more with that statement. Farah, thank you so much for joining us on Speaking of Quality. You shared some great anecdotes; you gave us some great advice and it was great to hear about the incredible work happening at the Philadelphia Education Fund.  Thank you for listening to this episode of Speaking of Quality, Wealth Management Insights. Our next episode will be released shortly. In the meantime, please send suggestions or questions for me or the Haverford Trust team to marketing@haverfordquality.com. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, and share this podcast. Until next time, I’m Hank Smith. Stay bullish.

30:02 Maxine Cuffe

Thanks for listening to this episode of Speaking of Quality, Wealth Management Insights with Hank Smith. To hear future episodes of Speaking of Quality, please subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. To learn more about the Haverford Trust Company, please visit www.haverfordquality.com.  

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