A Letter from Lisa Castillo Richmond to the PCC Community

Lisa’s Last Blog Post | Letter from the PCC Board Chair

Dear PCC Community,

As I reflect on my tenure at PCC during the better part of the last decade, I am filled with gratitude for the many incredible people who I have met on this journey, the deep relationships that I have made over time, and the work we have been able to do together. PCC’s story is one of partnership and building collective power, challenging the status quo, and identifying opportunities to press against educational inequity and injustice for the oldest learners in our education system. This is difficult, but deeply gratifying, work. It is hard to imagine doing something in our field that I believe is more important than the work we have collectively moved forward at PCC to expand college access, opportunity, affordability, accountability, and student success. And yet, there is so much more work to do.

Being part of the team that has built such an important and powerful platform for college students and equity in Illinois has been the great honor of my career. When I assumed the role of Executive Director four years ago, I shared that I wanted to make sure to leave PCC with strong roots and branches. Roots that go deep and would enable us to grow and sustain the organization over time, and branches of programming, policy, and research that would together enable us to achieve impact. Even though these are still early days in PCC’s history, I feel we have been able to do that in so many ways with our small and mighty team.

To our funders who have enabled every aspect of our work, we could not do any of this without you. From our deeply-committed founding funders who took a chance on a new organization backed by a need in our community and have stood by us all these years, to those who have invested in our moonshot ideas and our big bets over the last nine years – Thank you!

To our founding Board and every Board member who has served the organization during my tenure, thank you for your time, your service, and your personal investments into PCC. I have learned from you and could never have made it through some of the most challenging times without you.

To our many partners who have done this work with us and without whom we could not have moved this work forward, thank you for everything you do – so often unrecognized. To our fellow equity practitioners at colleges and universities across the state, including those who spent the last six years with us as our founding cohort of the ILEA Initiative and our DERA implementation partners, I have been inspired by you and you have taught me so much in all of the ways in which you lead and conceive of the collective work of making our colleges and universities more equitable institutions. To our partners in the Illinois General Assembly, especially those who have locked arms with us to advance powerful legislation and speak truth to power. To our partners in our state agencies, in the governor’s office, and in college access, success, policy, practice, and research organizations across the state and nation. Thank you to all of our partners for your leadership, commitment, and considerable brain power.

To my network of organizational and institutional leaders who have been part of my informal kitchen cabinet, thank you for mentoring me, providing thought partnership, letting me borrow your brilliant ideas, given me feedback, served as powerful examples to look to, and commiserated with me when times were tough – you will never know how grateful I am to you.

To the many deeply talented and hard-working friends and colleagues with whom I have had the incredible fortune to build the Partnership for College Completion – I hope you know how grateful I am to you. So much of who I am as a scholar-practitioner and what I think about this work of organizational equity change, the role of leadership, policy, and so much more, I have learned alongside you, working shoulder to shoulder for years. This incredible crew of humans who came together for a time to do big things on behalf of equity in our higher education system. Thank you for giving this first-generation college student the best, most meaningful, most fun, and fulfilling work experience of her life.

PCC is just getting started and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

With gratitude and admiration,