Elevating Teachers and Their Exponential Impact with Nínive Calegari 

Nínive Calegari: It is an awesome job. If your job is to watch other people grow, it's so fulfilling. And that's why I get so frustrated when this profession gets diminished in any way, because it's so important for our economy, our democracy, for building a future workforce, but it's also so worthwhile.

Kate Tucker: I'm Kate Tucker, and this is Hope Is My Middle Name, a podcast from Consensus Digital Media. Did you have a teacher who made an impact on your life, who helped you realize that you have something unique and powerful to offer the world. I'm grateful to say that I did. In fact, my first real job was teaching high school, and much of what I did was inspired by the amazing teachers I've been fortunate to learn from along the way.

That is why I am thrilled to bring you this conversation with Nínive Calegari. Nínive is one of those people who just makes things happen, and it just so happens that she is fully committed to the intergenerational work of supporting teachers and students. She is the founder and CEO of the Teacher Salary Project, whose mission is to ensure that teaching becomes the prestigious, financially viable, and professionally exciting job that it can and should be.

With novelist Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, Nínive co-founded 826 Valencia, a non-profit helping students find their voice through storytelling and creative writing. I first learned about Nínive through her work with Enterprise for Youth, which, since it began in 1969, has placed more than 25,000 young people and paid in often multi-year internships in fields like healthcare, climate, and technology.

Oh yeah, and Nínive started out as a social studies teacher. As you're about to hear, she is all about elevating the work of teachers and the singular role they play in fostering our country's greatest asset, our young people.

Hello, Nínive. I'm so glad to get to talk with you today. Thank you so much for being here.

Nínive Calegari: Hi, Kate. Thank you for having me.

Kate Tucker: All right. Well, let's just jump right in. I'd love to start with you. Where did you grow up? Tell me about your childhood a bit and what it was like for you growing up.

Nínive Calegari: I grew up a little bit all over the place. I was born in San Francisco and then I moved to Mexico and then I came back to San Francisco. So I did not go to high school in San Francisco. I went to an all girls Catholic boarding school. My high school experience is part of the reason that I am a deeply stubborn educator because I felt what it feels like when it feels good.

And then I went back East for college and I stayed for graduate school and I came back and I fell in love with a sort of a boy next door dynamic. My husband was born in the same hospital and we had known each other as kids, sort of crossed paths starting at age 12, but thankfully, we steered clear from each other until we were 27, so we had the chance to have, like, a nice romance, and here we are. That's my entire life.

Kate Tucker:  Here we are. So, okay, so you're back in San Francisco, where you were born and raised. You went to Mexico. Are you Mexican?

Nínive Calegari: I am Mexican.

Kate Tucker: And so you grew up in a bilingual household?

Nínive Calegari: I did. My dad was, my dad is in heaven, but he was American, but when he fell in love with my mom, one of the many romantic things he did is he had taken Spanish at Piedmont High, but he went to a language school called the Berlitz and Improved his language skills and wrote my grandfather these imploring letters about how much he loved my mother and how they had to get married.

And so my father spoke really good Spanish and my mom is from Mexico City and you know, I'm Mexican American I'm also a Mexican citizen and I spent a lot of summers with my family in Mexico and a lot of times we would fly like on you know, on the 25th of December, cause the flights were really good prices. And I would spend even Christmas with my family. So my mom is really close to her siblings and her cousins. My nickname in Mexico, which you'll appreciate is either La Clemens, which is my American last name, or La Gringa, which is like little white one, because I'm the lightest person in my family. And I was the littlest and I was worthy of being teased, which of course means you're just loved.

Kate Tucker: Totally. Growing up in that sort of experience where you had to go down to Mexico and connect with a really vibrant sort of family life, what do you remember being instilled in you about learning, about grades, about teachers even back then? 

Nínive Calegari: Growing up, and I know you want to talk about teaching and learning sort of more classically, but I will say that being bicultural, I found myself even from when I was a child going to Mexico and defending Americans and then being in the U.S. and always defending Mexicans. And so that to me is part of the beauty and the challenge. And sometimes you get through, sometimes you get to share with the other culture, the value and the preciousness and the wonderful nature of the other culture. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. I want to know, you know, were there teachers as you were growing up, were there teachers who kind of helped you feel at ease in that or actually called you out to kind of step into that curiosity and that singularity of that bicultural experience?

Nínive Calegari: I think what I remember most is just trying to blend in and then the teachers that really have meant a lot to me are my art teachers. Like, I remember Mr. Speece when I was a super little person and then Ms. Woolz. Ms. Woolz literally starting from third through eighth grade used to stand up on tables and just exuberantly yell, like, "Take up the whole space of the paper, like, make sure you're using the entire paper. It's yours." And she just wanted us so badly to express ourselves. And in high school, I had this other art teacher named Miss Chick, who I just adored. I mean, she was a phenomenal artist, an incredible educator. So I've been so blessed. I've had good teachers from when I was little, and it feels to me that the through line is more about the arts, where I loved being.

I honestly, to tell you the truth, when I was little in San Francisco, I prayed that people would not figure out that my mother was Mexican. I remember being in situations as La Gringa, I'm white passing. And I just remember people saying things about Mexican people. And I remember thinking like, Oh my God, let's make sure these people have no idea my mother's Mexican. So I don't remember anybody really celebrating Mexican culture when I was little, to be honest. How sad is that? I hope that's really not the case anymore. 

Kate Tucker: So through the arts and through this sort of invitation to be creative and take up the whole page, you are feeling sort of connected and enlivened. Do you remember the moment you decided that you were going to become a teacher? 

Nínive Calegari: It's so incredible, but I do. I remember being in high school at this beautiful high school that was just very, very, very, very thoughtfully and lovingly run by a group of very brilliant nuns. And I remember walking through the gardens of my high school and realizing that I liked spaces that had different generations in them and that I would probably spend my career being in a multi-generational space.

I then remember in college, there were two women in my class. Their names were Sarah and Katie. And I literally remember thinking that I really did want to be a teacher. And they both had these extraordinary personalities. And I remember thinking, well, I'm not going to have like buckets and buckets of money, but in both of their cases, their parents were educators. And I was like, well, I won't have tons and tons and tons of money, but my kids are going to have great personalities. And my proof is Katie and Sarah. So to me, that was scientific, you know, scientific evidence. 

Kate Tucker: I think that is. Wow. So once you decided you're going to become a teacher and you go and you follow that path, take me to the first day you entered the classroom. I mean, set the scene. What was going through your mind? Because I've been a teacher myself and I can, I remember that very viscerally. Tell me what it was like for you. 

Nínive Calegari: I remember being in a lot of first settings, but I don't have the sort of one first day experience. I remember when I was offered the job at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, I remember when I was offered the job at Archie Williams, and I remember when I was offered the job at San Francisco's first charter school, Leadership High School. So I remember the moments when somebody said to me, I remember who they were, where I was, everything. I remember those moments.

Kate Tucker: Yeah, how did that feel? I mean, maybe the first one, what did it feel like to think, Oh my gosh, this is actually happening. And now it's on me. 

Nínive Calegari: I was in Bolivia and I was talking to the superintendent of Cambridge Rindge and Latin, and it was over the summer and I was essentially on a wait list and he was trying to find room for me. I had done my student teacher work at that high school where everybody knows Patrick Ewing and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck went there. Anyway, that high school. What's so special about that one is that Cambridge is a unified district. And so there's a lot of different kids coming from different places.

We would literally have students in the same classroom that really, truly had different experiences. And we all know how valuable that is and how difficult that is to maintain. And so I really wanted to teach there. I loved the high school and the superintendent was able to find a spot for me and it was just a total dream come true.

I was so incredibly excited. And then by that next spring, there was a 2 million shortfall. And because of the union rules of last in first out, I was let go with all the other first year and second year teachers. And that year I had been paid 19,000. And people said, well, if you stick around for the summer, once things shake out, you probably get your job back in August, but I didn't have enough money to pay rent. So I just, sort of was forced to look elsewhere, but it was a big turning point because I would have never left Cambridge. I loved the district. I loved the faculty I taught with were stunning. They were so vibrant. It was an unbelievably blessed place to be a first year teacher. I was so lucky and I was very sad to be let go. And then I went over to Marin County, California.

At Marin, I taught at Archie Williams, and that's another school that taught me that I could be stubborn as an educator. Archie Williams is a very vibrant school. It's in Marin County, which is so great. Super duper wealthy and they have parcel taxes that subsidize the schools and they're able to offer better teacher compensation. And also I could go into Bill Purcell, my principal, and say,
Hey, there's a three day workshop down at Stanford and I really want to go. It costs this much money. I'm going to need a sub for three days."

And his response was always, "Oh my gosh, Nineve, that sounds amazing. When you come back, please, please, please come to my office and tell me all about it." It was such a healthy place. And then, I mean, just to touch into some of the problems that we have in American public schools is the social studies department over in Marin we would have money at the end of the year in our budget, and we would know friends over in Oakland who hadn't had enough money even for pencils. And so the fact that we do our funding in that way, district by district, it just creates these incredible inequities. I am grateful to have taught in a well funded district, Kate, because I do feel that I know in my bones that it can be different.

You know, youth outcomes are mainly reliant on their parent level of education. And so Marin also has a highly educated demographic. And yet still, I think being in a school with challenges, with a whole bunch of multi parent dimensional pieces moving in different parts, I'm super grateful because I know what it feels like to be in a well run school. 

Kate Tucker: Right. You started out with that experience with scarcity, the deficit sort of like side of the range where they're letting you go because they can't even afford to keep you on for 19,000 a year. And then you're in this completely different scenario. Tell me about Leadership High School as being San Francisco's first charter school. What were some of the challenges you faced working there? And then how did that school also support you? How is that different?

Nínive Calegari: So Leadership, I taught in its third and fourth year. So I helped graduate the first senior class. And the way I think about it is I think we were all sort of 26 to 28 year olds. And we were super well intentioned, but I think we were missing two major features in the high school. I think that 28 year olds are awesome, but I actually think there should be people with more senior experience and then the enthusiastic young professionals. I just like everybody in the mix. And I think we were missing that, missing some of that senior wisdom. 

And then I also realized with a small school that I didn't go to school, just for class. I went to school for the arts program, and the yearbook program, and the field hockey, and all the different activities. And we tried to make sure that the kids had more things to engage in, but we didn't have a fully fledged theater program or a football team, or there just wasn't enough of the other things that I think kids deserve to explore their interests. We offered them the best we could, but I think kids deserve more.

Kate Tucker: What were you teaching at the time?

Ninive Calegari: I'm a social studies teacher. I was teaching U.S. history, economics, U.S. government. Those were the two years, juniors and seniors. 

Kate Tucker: I mean, you're like in your late 20s and you're doing all this grading and prep and everything that comes with being a teacher. And yet you're also doing all the legwork that it takes to like start a school from the ground up. Did you wonder if that's what you were meant to be doing or, or did you like feel called toward this more visionary work? 

Ninive Calegari: I mean, I think when you're in it, you're in it. Even though we were young, we were on a mission together. And that was one of the positive things, but we did know it was insane. The college counselor left in the fall and suddenly everyone, including myself, who was a senior advisor, we became the ad hoc college counselors. There were serious high stakes issues that we had to take head on, and we knew that it was insane. At the same time, we were deeply loving to this group of young people, and in fact, I do think that they understood that we absolutely loved them and we respected them.

Kate Tucker: Early on, was there a student or a story you'd be willing to share where you were like, I'm energized by this, like, this is where I'm meant to be. 

Nínive Calegari: I love, love, love teaching. I still consider it the best job that I ever had. Ana Moraga, she's an attorney now, and she remembers the story of how I sat her down. I said, you can earn 6, 000 by spending 45 minutes on this essay. She did get a scholarship called the Meritus Scholarship and she got others. And that's why I'm stubborn about teachers earning a good pay is that it is an awesome job. If your job is to watch other people grow, it's so fulfilling. And that's why I get so frustrated when this profession gets diminished in any way, because it's so important for our economy, our democracy, for building a future workforce, but it's also so worthwhile. 

Kate Tucker: Tell me about when you started to see that you were up against some challenges that no matter how much energy and time and love you put into it, you weren't maybe going to be able to shift it enough to where teachers had the support they needed, the salaries they needed, to offer the exponential support they were giving to their students already. I mean, tell me, how did that begin to change for you? 

Nínive Calegari: Since I was in college to today, that's the exact same time frame when teachers went from being in the middle class to driving Uber, so my career reflects that change in our country. So when I was in college, Katie and Sarah's parents owned their home, they had stable finances, they weren't housekeeping or selling blood or doing these insane things.

So the beginning of my twenties, I had no money, but I didn't know anybody who had any money. Later in my twenties, when I started dating my now husband and his friends all graduated from their MBA program and they started getting these jobs with these really incredible salaries, I remember thinking, you're not smarter than I am.

And yet suddenly I can see that their careers are gonna go in a totally different direction very, very, very quickly. And that I would be still on this little step ladder hoping to earn an extra 1,800 every year, whatever it is. That's when I started to say, wait a second, people should be super interested in teaching.

But I knew that the salary was a big driver. And then I also saw very blatantly, people that are adding value in their own way, but are not at the center of our future workforce, democracy and economy and making so much more money. And so that's when it was like this turning point of like, wait a second, this doesn't add up. This isn't right! 

Kate Tucker: Yeah, how long did you stay in that? I mean, like, tell me more about how that made you feel at first, and then, how long did you sort of have to sit in that before you started to formulate the plan that would lead you to where you are now? 

Nínive Calegari: Well, I literally remember two instances when I was teaching in Marin and one was walking down the hallway of Archie Williams and thinking, everyone should want my job. Like this is an unbelievably incredible job. It's an honor. And then at the same time, I literally remember one party, I'm standing next to a friend who's an attorney and we were talking to elders in our community and they asked us each what we were doing. And she said, attorney, and she got like 17 follow up questions about her job and her impact.

And I said, teacher, and I got, Kate, the like, "Oh, good for you," in the most saccharine tone. That's when I came up with like, not good for me, good for our democracy and our economy lady! Like this isn't good for me. This is good for all y'all. Still was motivated to go and teach at Leadership because I really wanted to be a part of the first charter school movement.

And then the moment that we decided to take action was when I was running 826 and Dave Eggers was not a name board president. I kept all the titles to myself, I had all the titles, so he was not board president, but that was the role. So on a weekly basis. I would bring him the like, here are the five things I'm worried about.

And we'd hash it out, agree to a plan and move forward. I had an open air office that was on the top of a turret and everyone in the mission could hear our conversation. So if we needed to have a confidential conversation, we would go outside and. stand there next to where all the garbage and the recycling bins were. So we're standing outside and I know that his sister was a teacher and I know that his mother was a teacher. And he says something along the lines of, "I can't understand why teachers are so underpaid. This is so insane." And I said to him, "Dave, I'd rather raise teacher pay than do anything else in my life." My entire career, like already at that point, I was 29 or 30 and I'd already done all the calculations that I wanted to do. Like I've just seen the school, seen everything. And I thought that that was going to be just the greatest driver of professionalizing my job. And that's when the two of us together started to take action. And that was 21 years ago.

Kate Tucker: Was this the beginning, then, of the Teacher Salary Project? 

Nínive Calegari: Yeah, we didn't call it that then, um, because what we started working on is we started working on a book. So the book was called Teachers Have It Easy, The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers, and that came out in 2005. Essentially what happened with the book is a lot of people said, "Oh, I gave it to my cousin, she's a teacher." And I'm like, Ugh, she doesn't need to read this book, she already knows. She knows everything that's in this book. We did not write it for any teacher. We wrote it to try and create the political will to do something about this problem. And we thought it was bad then. It's only worse now. 

Kate Tucker: Okay. So you went straight for it and wrote a book, which takes a lot of time, but creates the sort of foundation for which to start a non-profit that still exists to this day. 

Nínive Calegari: Yeah, which is a failure, right? Because we want the Teacher Salary Project to be obsolete.

Kate Tucker: Okay. I want to explore that. But first, let's set up where you're at in your career at this point. So you put out the book in 2005, you leave 826 Valencia in 2008 and become the CEO and founder of the Teacher Salary Project. And then in 2011, you put out a documentary called American Teacher. So, what is the overall purpose of the Teacher Salary Project?

Nínive Calegari: The Teacher Salary Project would love to see teachers paid professionally so that they can be the professionals that we need them to be. Over the course of our lifetimes, teachers have gone from being in the middle class to actually struggling incredibly. And the shortages and the turnover are really demonstrating this incredible need to do better as a country.

Kate Tucker: So you talk about it as a failure, and I want to get to where we are today, but tell me when you started to realize that maybe just telling the story wasn't going to be enough. I mean, tell me some of the stories you tried out and what the film showed. Give me some examples of what your other teachers were saying and kind of those stories that you thought might move the needle, and then maybe why you think they didn't.

Nínive Calegari: I am very, very, very saddened by teachers having so little economic stability. And so to me, the standard is as long as one teacher is housekeeping for extra cash or driving Uber for extra cash, it's too many. There was a really, really beautiful teacher in Texas named Eric Benner and he was teaching and just being inspiring and designing these beautiful lesson plans. And then he was going and working at a place like a Floor and Decor or Lowes after school.

And then the other story in the film is Jonathan Dearman, a dear friend of mine who had taught at Leadership High and to make ends meet, he had had a real estate license before. And while he was teaching, he had two small children. He renewed it. And he was trying to sell real estate at the same time while he was teaching and he got really burnt out. He ultimately ended up leaving the classroom.

And then there's another teacher named Jamie and she was teaching in Brooklyn. She was the classic teacher story where she was teaching first grade and just loving on her kids and teaching reading, which everybody knows is so important. And she was doing the classic thing, which is just like, getting there at six and then tutoring somebody and then tutoring after school and she was pregnant and trying to have a family.

And so there's two different kinds of secondary income. There's people who are selling real estate, working at Floor and Decor, housekeeping, driving Uber. And then there's these other jobs that people just accept, like tutoring or monitoring the SAT or teaching summer school. Like I can think of a lot of fun things I think college kids should do. And I think college kids should be America's tutors. I don't think teachers should be America's tutors. So people accept that teachers are doing that. But the reason that they're tutoring at 6am. and at 5pm is because they don't have enough money. So those were the stories that we told. And then as time went on, the stories got worse.

The housekeeping story was one out of Florida that just slayed me, Kate. It slayed me. This teacher was housekeeping after school and on the weekends, and she was in the car with her mother and her son. She was going to take her son to the movies. And the grandmother turned to the son and said, "I'm going to give you five dollars for popcorn. When you go to the movies with your mom, buy some popcorn." And the son said, "No, um, give that money to my mom. She really needs it." And it's just too much. It's just too much. And there's so much evidence about teachers not being able to afford summer camps, not being able to afford orthodonture. These are not like insane expectations for people who have Bachelor's degrees and Master's degrees.

And then we found stories about teachers waiting in line with food stamps with their children, teachers selling blood platelets. And I think part of the reason that we've let it get this far is that teachers are so honorable and they have been quite quiet about their financial stress. They've adopted the Mother Teresa model, which is the work is noble, which it is. It's fulfilling. It's about young people. So therefore we should be treated like we are in a convent? Teachers have not historically been great advocates for themselves. And I think it has to do with these cultural norms

But another amazing story is about a teacher named Cori O'Rourke, and she was driving both Uber and Lyft. And she was doing that because she wanted to make sure that she could get her kids some of the experiences they wanted. She could put food on the table, but she wanted to be able to do some of the extras. When people from other countries would get into her car and they would find out that she was an educator, they were incredulous. They were like, "You have to drive a cab? You're an educator!" And they could see the ridiculous nature of this situation and the position that she was in. And when Americans would get into the Uber or Lyft, and she would say, "Oh, I'm a teacher." They would say, "What a great job for a teacher." What is that? That's insane. In fact, I always do get kind of a little spicy around Uber because Uber did in 2017, this huge, huge campaign to recruit teachers. So instead of taking billions of dollars to subsidize or to pass laws for minimum pay or I mean, there's a million different ways that they could be working on professionalizing my job, instead, they were like, "Oh, let's just have them drive Uber until 11 o'clock at night." How could any teacher who's doing that maximize young people's learning? How? 

Kate Tucker: I have no idea. I mean, I only have my own experience, which was brief, but I remember having no time for anything but grading and planning and counseling and tutoring and showing up early for writing programs. And I mean, like going on field trips, going on weekend things. I can't even imagine how you have the time. And I didn't even have a family. I was in my early twenties. And I cried almost every night for the first half of the year when I first started.

And I also felt so impassioned and so fulfilled in so many ways, but also like, Oh my God, I'm about to completely burn out. And then what will happen? Then what will happen to them? And then my dad was a junior high teacher, greatly beloved, and he had to go back to long distance truck driving to make ends meet for our family, you know, so to this day he has students who just come back and they just want to see him and be with him and talk to him and share stories. And it's like just imagine if he'd been able to do that his whole life.

So tell me kind of where are you seeing some light, you recently went to DC. Talk to me about you know where you are now and why you're picking it back up.  

Nínive Calegari: Well, so we did a governor's challenge many moons ago, and we did get every teacher in West Virginia a raise. And the way we were able to do that is that we were able to speak to the then governor's education staff, and we showed them evidence that the state was training teachers, but they were leaving to neighboring states for minuscule amounts of differentiated pay, higher pay.

I think that one thing that's really very important for people to understand is that we're not motivated by money. We're motivated by making an impact, but we still make financially-based decisions. And so we had that success then, but when we did our first governor's challenge, we could get no other governor to make a statement. There was no action. There was no legislation. Most recently, what happened is Dr. Ellen Sherratt is our lead researcher. She has a PhD. She's an economist. And Frederica Wilson, who is a Congresswoman out of Florida, reached out to Ellen and said, "I know teachers need to be paid more money. I don't know how to do it." And so we were able to co-author a piece of legislation.

So the Teacher Salary Project just, two short years ago, co-authored a piece of legislation that's been dropped twice in Congress. It now has 91 congressional leaders supporting it, and it's an incentivizing grant which invites any state to raise their minimum pay up to 60,000, which no one has right now. And what would happen is that the government would infuse you with four years of cash to build the bridge to get up to 60,000.

But the way that you win the grant is by showing that you can maintain that. We have always considered ourselves totally bipartisan. I think that it's really important to have a good teacher in every classroom, wherever that child is sitting. At this point, the work has been more and more bipartisan and it's more and more obvious, with two-thirds of districts around the nation having shortages, that solutions are necessary.

I will give you some hope, which is that 19 different states have been proposing different pieces of legislation, mainly around minimum pay, but also in California, there's AB 938 that would raise teacher pay by 50%, which is really bold and ambitious and awesome and impossible right now with our finances, but it's just the right direction. The past few years, we've had the president for the first time in our lifetime say that teachers need a raise. And we've had 26 governors make statements.

So I used to wonder, like, how bad does it have to get before people realize that this job is so precious to all of us? So I always pray, and this is my prayer for today, my hope is that this is as bad as it gets. Teacher morale is the lowest among our lifetimes. 62 percent of American parents are imploring their kids to not teach. We have incredibly high turnover. We have absenteeism like we have never seen before. We have anxiety levels like we've never seen before. So kids need more than ever loving, prepared people.

Not only do we have empty classrooms, we have a ton of under qualified people also. So we've tracked that, and the Economic Policy Institute also tracks the teacher pay penalty. So state by state, you can see how much college educated teachers are penalized compared to other college educated professionals for being a teacher.

So we have all the data in the world. And then we have this obvious reality, which is that we all know that there was an awesome teacher who found the light in us. Like we all actually internally know the truth, which is that everybody deserves to have an opportunity to have somebody illuminate something for them. We all know it, but now we've got to figure out how to legislate it. 

Kate Tucker: Okay, I want to shift a bit to your work with 826 and Enterprise for Youth because I feel like it's interesting you come back to this point with the Teacher Salary Project as it feels like kind of the foundation for everything else. Like if we can do this, we're, we're strengthening the entire system. You started 826 Valencia with Dave Eggers. What is 826 Valencia? 

Nínive Calegari: 826 Valencia is a writing factory where we gather adults to help young people find their stories, listen to their stories, and then we publish stories. And we also work in schools, where we're helping teachers inspire young people to write, but we're also getting a lot of young people the undivided attention that we know requires to get those stories to be perfect.

Kate Tucker: And why is storytelling so important to this greater work that you're doing? 

Nínive Calegari: When you ask young people if they like to write, generally, there's a lot of reticence around loving writing. And then when you get into the work of it, and you get the right supports in place, and the young person has created a story that they're proud of, it really changes their affection for this craft, which is, inherently so incredibly difficult.

And we know that good communication skills are essential. And we also know that too many stories are not told. So we also ask young people before we start a project at 826, do you have an important story to tell? And frequently they'll say no, but after working with 826, they will say, I do have an important story to tell. So it's like a dignity restoration exercise in addition to a technical exercise. It's really both. 

Kate Tucker: I love that. I want to know more about the inspiration for 826 and how it might maybe sync up with the work you're doing now with the Teacher Salary Project. 

Nínive Calegari: Well, I'll say when Dave and Vendala invited me to join them as a founder at 826, what Dave saw is he had had experiences where he had wanted to volunteer at schools and he was looking for something where there would be flexibility because he's a writer and a journalist as you know and an artist and a designer and he is either in massive production mode and sometimes he's not and so he thought wow there's all these people that I know who are creative and who are out in the world freelancing and it would be great to take advantage of their talents and insights and their creativity when they're not in massive production mode. So he knew that there was a talent pool out there that needed to be tapped, but it needed to be flexible.

And what I knew is that teachers, even in the best circumstances, like I would consider Marin an amazing place to teach, I still needed help. Even in the best of circumstances, I still had 146 youth. So I knew that teachers would relish the help. And so those two things came together powerfully. And what was amazing about Dave is that when we agreed that we would work at teacher's behest to honor teachers and that their word was always the final word, in his case, he really meant it.

It was a joyful, joyful, I mean, I'm the luckiest professional ever, but it was a joyful collaboration. And we really did work at teacher's behest. And we really did go in and ask teachers what their dreams were. If you ask any teacher, "What's your dream project that you've never had the resources to do?"

Every teacher has an answer. I knew enough about how schools worked. I never asked the principal for money. We just asked teachers what help they needed, what projects, and then we help them make those dreams come true. And so we'd bring them human resources and publishing resources, and we would create these incredible projects.

I started running conferences where people would fly in literally internationally to find out how we were running field trips and how we work in schools and how we were doing these publishing projects and how we were, you know, collaborating both with teachers, but also the creative class. And so we were able to share those stories and those best practices, and we joyfully shared everything that we could, and things grew very, very quickly. It was, it's kind of astonishing to look back and realize how many chapters we opened in quite a short amount of time, but it was really this grassroots interest from communities. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah, I love how you're, I mean, you're finding all these ways to get to the same sort of goal. Obviously, it still has to come back to supporting teachers, but that you're doing it in these really creative ways. So you go on from there and do a bunch of different things. But when I I first heard of you, you were heading up Enterprise for Youth. What is Enterprise for Youth and what drew you to work there?

Nínive Calegari: Enterprise for Youth is a 55 year old non-profit that does job training and job paid internships. And 55 years ago, an American hero named Gladys Thatcher was getting her counseling degree and it was 1969. And she felt that adults were too authoritarian and that young people needed somebody to care about their dreams. And she conceived of this idea when she was driving. She got her master's in counseling in Marin and she remembers driving across the Golden Gate Bridge and thinking that adults needed to be better listeners and that she wanted to create opportunities for youth to get ready for work so that they could see their dreams come true.

So that was it. Such a simple, but perfect idea then, and it's exactly what we still do now. So we ask young people where they think they'd like to go, and they can also do a lot of career exploration, and they can do sort of strengths assessments and figure out what their interests are and what treasures they can bring to the world, and then from there, their place in paid internships.

I was drawn to this because I was pretty worried about the American dream and how fragile it is. And I think there's a lot of evidence to point to being worried about it. And so seven years ago, I just realized that if I can't transform American public schools by professionalizing the teaching profession, what I can do, at least in San Francisco, is make sure that some young people have immersive work experiences that will actually prepare them and bridge the gap between wherever their families may be financially, which the youth that we work for, their parents don't have a lot of dough, but the youth, as you know, are super talented and have big dreams. And so we're able to bridge that gap with work experience. And there's research to back up this model.

And the exciting thing about where Enterprise is in its 55th year is that starting on January 1, a former student from Leadership High School, Carlos Solis, is now, the board selected him as the new CEO. So I, for the moment, work for him. I'm something called a Senior Advisor, and I'm just here to try and make sure that anything that's in my brain ends up either on a piece of paper or in his brain. He's an awesome, awesome guy. And he has enormous, enormous integrity. He loves young people and he really understands their potential and he understands what these internships can do. And I think he's going to do an awesome job. 

Kate Tucker: That's so amazing. And what better way to have that more seamless transition than to work with someone who's so connected to you from the beginning. I read about Enterprise for Youth that recently, a lot of the youth have been gravitating towards climate related internships, which I think is amazing because you're helping them find hope for the future and hope for the planet. Talk to me about some of the climate related initiatives and internships, and maybe if you have a story there, I'd love to hear it.

Nínive Calegari: Oh my gosh, Kate,  I have so many stories. So the climate work actually really started over 40 years ago. So we've been in partnerships with San Francisco Rec and Park for years and years and years. And then soon after I arrived, I knew that green careers would continue to grow and that climate jobs would be necessary in the future. And so we wrote a hundred letters to agencies in the city, asking them if they would take on interns. And we got one response. Nobody cared about our letter, except for Nature in the City.

So one agency took on youth, and then Nature in the City came back to us and said, we need to do more. And we were able to leverage Nature in the City's relationships to get into a ton more different agencies. And so now, the youth are everywhere. And what we've done now with the Climate Career Corps is that we have integrated a lot more green skills training. We've integrated a signature climate summit where youth hear from a whole wide range of green professionals so they can hear like, Oh, it's about renewable fuels. Oh, it's about electric cars. Oh, it's about recycling. It's about all these different things. It's about government jobs. It's about legislating. It's about plastic bags. It's about everything.

I personally feel incredibly excited about young people learning green skills and getting this exposure because the way I think about it is whether you're going to go run a hospital, work at City Hall, or go and work in solar renewable energy, having those green skills will be helpful and meaningful for all of us as we chase toward some hopeful climate solutions. So it has been so exciting to work on this project. 

Kate Tucker: I'm curious for you how your work with Enterprise for Youth may have sort of been similar to teaching in ways that you've shaped the trajectory of some of these kids lives. How has it felt similar to the Nineve in her 20s out there hustling for those students at the leadership school?

Nínive Calegari: I think the similarity is there's never, ever, ever enough of young people hearing from adults, whether they're brand new or they're like integrated into their lives, how special they are. You get to instill a sense of hope by just letting them know that they're good, that you see them leaning in and that just acknowledging whatever their talents are, whatever their interests are, and just humanizing them as an individual is exactly what I was doing in the classroom. It's just the same stuff. And it's so fun. 

Kate Tucker: What's next for you? Where are you focusing your energy as you look ahead? 

Ninive Calegari: I'm definitely going to spend the rest of my life trying to hang out in multi-generational settings and getting to meet and celebrate young people and watching them grow because that's what I live for, but I don't know exactly how or where. I don't know.

Kate Tucker: I love that that's what you identified in high school that you wanted to do and you're still doing it. It's so beautiful.

Nínive Calegari: Well, thanks.

Kate Tucker: What's giving you reasons to hope these days?

Nínive Calegari: One of my favorite young people in the world is named Imani Hartso, and before she started in the Climate Career Corps, she admitted herself that she was feeling quite hopeless and that the climate crisis was already lost, and she wasn't seeing the solutions. And I think that it makes me feel really excited that after working at Enterprise through the Climate Career Corps, she felt like she could make a difference, that there are solutions, and it is worth it. hoping and trying, and I'm just going to try and keep up with her.  

Kate Tucker: I love that. Nínive it's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing from your rich experience, and I'm so hopeful for the future and all this great work that you've been doing. Thank you. 

Nínive Calegari: Thank you for having me. I'm honored that you chose me.

Kate Tucker: Thank you. so much to Nínive Calegari for reminding us how important it is that we support our our teachers, students and their families. To find out more about the Teacher Salary Project, go to teachersalaryproject.org.

Learn more about Enterprise for youth at enterpriseforyouth.org and be inspired by the amazing work of 826 at 826valencia.org and 826national.org. We'll put all of this in the show notes at hopeismymiddlename.com.

Hope is My Middle Name is hosted and executive produced by me, Kate Tucker. You can find me on Instagram and on YouTube @KateTuckerMusic. And if there's someone you think belongs on the show, I would love to meet them. Send me a message. Hope Is My Middle Name can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

It would mean a lot, a lot, a lot if you would follow the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review, we love hearing from you. And if you're still listening, please copy the link to this episode, and send it to a friend. That alone actually makes a huge difference in helping us reach more people with more hope.

Hope Is My Middle Name is a podcast by Consensus Digital Media, produced in association with Reasonable Volume. This episode was produced by Christine Fennessy with editing from Rachel Swaby. Our production coordinator is Percia Verlin. Sound design and engineering by Mark Bush. Music by the fantastic artists at Epidemic Sound, Soundstripe, and me. Big thanks to Conor Gaughan, our publisher and fearless leader at Consensus Digital Media. And thank you so, so much for listening. See you next time!