Pitching Education for Hispanics

Former AT&T marketing executive helps scholarship fund flourish

When Sara Martinez Tucker joined the board of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund in 1992,

it was a small operation that handed out about $3-million per year to approximately 1,000 Latino students.

This year, says Ms. Tucker, a former marketing executive with AT&T and now the charity’s chief executive, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund will give $20-million in scholarships to 5,000 students. Buoyed by big gifts from the Lilly Endowment, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and corporations such as Coca-Cola and Ford Motor, Ms. Tucker has set her sights on a bold goal: doubling the rate at which Latino students earn a bachelor’s degree, from 9 percent of the Hispanic population to 18 percent, by 2010.

Meeting that goal won’t be easy, Ms. Tucker acknowledges. To do it, she says, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund will need $150-million in additional donations.

“There’s an incredible need for what we provide,” says Ms. Tucker, 46, who took the helm of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund in 1997. “The challenge for us is to meet that demand, or we run the risk of frustrating our population.”

One-Third Attend College

Indeed, the nation’s Hispanic population, which is expected to grow to 25 percent of the total population by 2050, is thirsty for higher education, but Latinos often face a parched field of dreams when searching for tuition money.

Because of poverty and a tendency among young Hispanics to stay close to home — often to help support parents and siblings — only one in three Latinos attends college, Ms. Tucker says. Among the total U.S. population, 44 percent of all high-school graduates do so, according to the American Council on Education.

What’s more, 77 percent of Latino college students drop out because of a lack of money, according to a study released in 2000 by the Harder Group, a private research company in San Francisco.

Despite the need for Hispanic scholarships, Ms. Tucker says, she has been frustrated that few Latino donors have stepped forward to help. Studies show that Hispanic immigrants send billions of dollars to their families and former neighbors in their native countries, Ms. Tucker says, but Latino donations to the Hispanic Scholarship Fund compare unfavorably with gifts from mainstream nonprofit groups.

“We have not been able to get the Latino community to be major funders with us in general,” she says.

Michael Cortés, director of the Institute for Nonprofit Organization Management at the University of San Francisco, says the problem Ms. Tucker faces exists at many Hispanic charities. “Historically, Latino nonprofits have been slow to develop a Latino donor base,” he says.

Still, Ms. Tucker can point to some success in seeking money from Hispanics. They accounted for nearly half of the money that the charity raised to start a $6.5-million endowment last month. The remainder came from matching gifts from the Lilly Endowment and corporate donors such as Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Ford Motor, and Hewlett-Packard.

$50-Million From Lilly

It is Ms. Tucker’s ability to raise money from big corporate donors and foundations that has most helped the Hispanic Scholarship Fund grow from a little-known nonprofit group to a national force in minority higher education.

Chief among the large grants was $50-million from the Lilly Endowment, in Indianapolis, in 1999. The grant will pay not only for scholarships, but also for new regional offices in such cities as Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, and for programs that encourage Latino youngsters to go to college.

Gretchen Wolfram, a spokeswoman for the Lilly Endowment, says Ms. Tucker’s ability to communicate the needs of poor Latino students and back up her presentations with facts persuaded the foundation to support the Hispanic Scholarship Fund.

“We were certainly impressed with Sara’s passion for her cause and her business background with AT&T,” says Ms. Wolfram. “She sold us on her strategy for using the money to make the organization grow.”

Besides benefiting from the Lilly money, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund is growing because of a collaboration with the United Negro College Fund to distribute $1-billion from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for minority scholarships. Over the next 20 years, the program will help pay for college educations for 1,000 high-school seniors per year — 350 of them Latinos picked by the Hispanic Scholarship Fund. The scholarships will be based on financial need.

Larger Presence

During her tenure as a board member and then president of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, Ms. Tucker has taken the good intentions of the charity’s founders and run with them, giving the organization a much larger presence among Hispanics than it had before she joined it, says Archbishop Patrick Flores, a Roman Catholic cleric in San Antonio and one of three Hispanics who co-founded the group in 1975.

“We needed new blood to take over,” Archbishop Flores says of Ms. Tucker, who replaced him as board chair in 1996.

With fewer than 10 staff members, Ms. Tucker says, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund of the early 1990s was ill-equipped to inform parents and students of its existence, monitor its scholars’ progress, and expand its list of donors to include alumni and large corporations — tasks it now performs regularly through the labors of its staff of 50. What’s more, the group needed a larger staff to handle more major gifts, Ms. Tucker says.

“We were a one-trick pony,” she says. “We did scholarships. That was it. We were stuck in the ‘70s.”

‘Mom and Pop Operation’

Ms. Tucker says that she gained the skills to help the charity grow when she was a vice president of AT&T in the 1980s and ‘90s and a member of its foundation board from 1990 to 1995.

She came to know about the Hispanic Scholarship Fund through Sarah Jepsen, then president of the AT&T Foundation. Ms. Jepsen asked her to look into the organization when some Hispanic employees at AT&T complained that the foundation’s $25,000 annual contribution to the Hispanic Scholarship Fund was paltry when compared with the multimillion-dollar grants it gave annually to the United Negro College Fund.

“Sarah pulled me aside and said that the United Negro College Fund is an organized business,” Ms. Tucker recalls. “She thought that the Hispanic Scholarship Fund looked like a mom-and-pop operation. ‘I don’t see it becoming a bigger, more successful operation,’ she told me. At the time, she was right.”

Nevertheless, the foundation doubled its commitment to the organization, to $50,000, in 1992. More important for the charity’s future, Ms. Tucker was named to the Hispanic Scholarship Fund’s board.

The charity needed to do more than hand out the money it received, she says. It had to broaden its mission to include better oversight of student performance, as well as make a concerted effort to recruit mentors to show students the importance of a college degree and tap its alumni for support. Studies commissioned by the Hispanic Scholarship Fund found that 97 percent of the group’s scholars during the 1970s and ‘80s had received bachelor’s degrees. Still, Ms. Tucker says, more should be done to keep tabs on students before and after graduation.

“All along we’ve been accountable to our donors,” says Ms. Tucker. “But were we accountable to our students? That was something I couldn’t satisfactorily answer five years ago.”

Since then, Ms. Tucker has used $1-million in grant money from the Goldman Sachs Foundation to open five Hispanic Scholarship Fund chapters on college campuses to help keep students in school. The chapters, at Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford Universities, the University of California at Berkeley, and her alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, are to be supplemented by 10 more this spring, she says.

In addition, Ms. Tucker has started holding meetings with parents of prospective scholarship recipients to let them know of the charity.

Asking for Money

Not that all of her ideas have come to fruition. Despite having a database of alumni names and addresses, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund has done little to turn past scholars into donors.

“I don’t know that groups like ours have done the best possible job of asking,” Ms. Tucker says. “We need to keep pushing our message out there.”

The more that message spreads, she says, the greater the chance that more Hispanic donors will step forward to help the organization.

“We need to use our alumni more effectively,” says Ms. Tucker. “If we can get them out there raising money for us, it would give us a good start on reaching our own people.”

SARA MARTINEZ TUCKER, PRESIDENT OF THE HISPANIC SCHOLARSHIP FUND

Age: 46

Place of birth: Laredo, Tex.

Education: Earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s in business administration from the University of Texas at Austin.

Previous employment: Worked for AT&T from 1979 to 1995, becoming the first Hispanic woman to reach the company’s executive level as a vice president. Before that, she worked as a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News.