UnidosUS Education Program Manager Shares His College and Career Success Story so that Affiliates Can Help Students to Do the Same
One of Daniel Ibarra Flores’s biggest career dreams became a reality in September 2022 when UnidosUS offered him a full-time role as an education program manager.
He’d come to know the organization in high school while participating in its Escalera college-and-career-readiness program at UnidosUS’s San Antonio Affiliate Mexican American Unity Council (MAUC), an experience that not only shaped his life but that of his family’s. After college, Ibarra returned to MAUC as a housing coordinator, and once on staff, he began assisting with signature UnidosUS educational programs such as the college readiness Escalara and the young Latino-male initiative Men of Action. Through this work, his family learned how UnidosUS leverages its Affiliate Network to provide all kinds of culturally and linguistically responsive programming to the Latino community. His mother joined the UnidosUS’s parent engagement program Padres Comprometidos and its health and nutrition program Comprando Rico y Sano, and his brother bought his first home after participating in the UnidosUS pre-home ownership program. Now more than two years into his dynamic staff role, Ibarra sat down with ProgressReport.co to share about his educational and career trajectory in an effort to inform and inspire other Latinos interested in a similar career track, as well as to provide readers with an UnidosUS programmatic update.
Q: Let’s talk first about your educational trajectory. How did you leverage Escalera to prepare for college and move into your community outreach program management roles?
A: When I was a student in the program around 2013 and 2014, my community, San Antonio’s Edgewood School District, was 98% Latino. I was a great student and a good kid who knew he wanted to get to college, but didn’t have any family members who had done that. Through my first mentor at the MAUC Escalera program, I was able to put some structure around that dream. I learned how to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), how to write a personal statement for college applications and how to participate in admissions interviews. Plus, even though I am originally from Mexico and I was surrounded by Latinos my whole life, it was Escalera that really connected me to my roots because it built that identity and taught me to be proud of my roots, which also prepared me for attending a predominantly white institution.
Thanks to Escalera, I went on to attend Texas A&M University where I majored in Business Management and minored in Latino/a and Mexican American Studies, and as soon as I graduated in 2018, I got my first job back at MAUC as the housing coordinator for this new MAUC center focused on helping folks with financial literacy, individualized housing counseling and foreclosure prevention. Through this work, I segued into co-facilitating the Escalera program and took the lead on Men of Action, which served at the time as a companion to our Latina-empowerment program Entre Mujeres. These roles inspired me to specialize in educational programming, and I wanted to make sure I got more training in preparation for higher ed. I left MAUC to spend two years serving as a college advisor for a hybrid non-profit start-up called IDEA-U that hosted a college degree program through Southern New Hampshire University. In that program, I worked directly with students, staff and community members at the Texas-based IDEA Public Schools who would take on online college courses and then come into our college completion center weekly, in-person, for one-on-one advising and tutoring.
Q: How did this early career path prepare you to come and work directly for UnidosUS’s education program teams?

A: These roles and my studies taught me to get to know my facilitators and program managers on a personal level. Since we at UnidosUS are providing grant funds and technical assistance, there are times when the check-ins I have to provide as a program manager probably feel to the facilitators like coming to the principal’s office. Whenever I meet a new facilitator, I always try to get to know them on a personal level, let them know about my own story and why I do this work. From there, it’s making sure that I’m true to my promises. I meet with facilitators monthly, and I make sure that after every meeting, I follow up with them via email or on call as quickly as possible to summarize what we discussed and see if there are more questions. I have a rule of following up within 48 hours, so that they know they can rely on me.
Having been part of the Affiliate Network for so long, and then also being an employee for an Affiliate, I already knew the impact of UnidosUS programming on a smaller level. Being on this side now, I’m able to see across the broader network and different regions. There are a lot of Affiliates out there who may hesitate to reach out to us, so as soon as I got into this role, I wanted to make sure they felt supported and comfortable reaching out to me. As I do this, I’m seeing similarities. For example, Affiliates in Nashville or Birmingham go through similar issues and challenges I was going through with MAUC in San Antonio.
Q: Let’s talk about the programs you used to attend or help with at the Affiliate level and how you are helping them grow and take on new life under your management.
A: Since I came into this role, we’ve made some updates to the Escalera program such as updating the curriculum to include career pathways when we talk about postsecondary opportunities, adding flexibility for our Affiliates to tailor the program to fit their community needs and re-structuring our grant awards to a tiered approach for more equitable awarding across program size. We had a strong and enduring program to begin with, so mostly we’ve been working to increase participant numbers by solidifying relationships we had with our Affiliates and engaging in outreach to new ones.
During the pandemic we were reporting numbers of about 700 students across about 20 Affiliates. Now, we have over 3,000 students and 34 Affiliate sites participating, including in Puerto Rico. That’s been really exciting because we have been able to impact more students’ lives, specifically in areas where there are a lot of Latinos, but not necessarily with the infrastructure or resources to properly support them towards postsecondary success. Through Escalera, we address these gaps by equipping students with the tools and knowledge they need to navigate postsecondary pathways, including college, workforce training and other career opportunities. By creating culturally affirming spaces, we help students see their identities as assets and build confidence in their ability to achieve their goals. As a result, we’re able to not only help increase postsecondary enrollment rates, but also empower students to take agency over their futures, creating generational change within their families and communities.
One of our biggest updates is that we’re bringing back the Men of Action program that was paused in 2019. It was a program targeted towards breaking down traditional machismo tendencies and allowing Latino men to define what it means to be a man in their own terms. Now it is shifting towards elevating the voices and experiences of Latino men by convening stakeholders, amplifying best practices and addressing pressing issues to improve outcomes in education, economic mobility and leadership. We know Men of Action is urgently needed. Coming out of the pandemic, many young people struggled with their mental health and feelings of isolation, and data shows that, 80% of deaths by suicide are committed by men. The suicide rate for Latino men has increased since 2011 climbing from 5.7 per 100,000 people to an alarming 7.9 per 100,000 in 2021, and the current rate among men is four times the rate for Latina women.

We also saw that in 2024, The Wall Street Journal published a study of students categorized as NEET, meaning not in education, employment or training. The U.S. study showed that in the first half of 2024, about 260,000 young men aged 16 to 29 were in that category. As of 2022, Latino males had a higher high school dropout rate compared to any other demographic group. White males have a college completion rate of about 45%, with Latino males at 21%, a huge disparity.
I’m working to revamp the initiative by figuring out the ways that we can help male-identifying Latinos reach their college and career goals. There are a lot of organizations out there that already do the work on helping Latino males reach success but they aren’t necessarily talking to each other. There are also national organizations that convene and connect nationally but not through a Latino lens. That’s a space UnidosUS wants to step into right now, working through systems change and connecting our Affiliates and external partners doing great work in this area.
Our Affiliates also tell us that it’s hard to recruit and retain male-identifying participants at any level of programming, and that there’s not much visibility on what Latino men are going through.
Q: What advice do you have for young Latinos who are interested in educational programming for their communities and trying to plan for their futures?
A: My advice is to be flexible and fluid. When you’re in a K-12 institution or a nonprofit, you’re wearing multiple hats at a time. You’re probably doing a lot of things that aren’t in your job description, but by being flexible with the responsibilities tacked onto you, you do gain a broad range of experiences and learn how to organize your time to manage multiple projects.
Finally, I always tell program facilitators that when they’re in front of students, they’re concept experts who can connect those students to career and college goals, so they need to experiment with their facilitation style to make it resonate with students. In my check-in calls with facilitators, I encourage them to be transparent with students who often see them as these perfect individuals who apparently knew how to get to college and knew all the right things to do to graduate and be in the positions that they are now. When you make yourself a bit more human and tell them how you struggled or even failed a class, but still ultimately succeeded, you’re more relatable. Students need transparency.
–Author Julienne Gage is a former UnidosUS staff member and longtime contributor to the Progress Report blog. She is currently obtaining her PhD in Anthropology in Florida International University’s Global and Sociocultural Studies Department.