BLCI BRIEF HISTORY ACCORDING TO FOUNDING EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR JULIO A. GALINDO:

The whole idea behind the Institute model was created and founded by Kenny Rogers (no, not the country music star) while he was a grad student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in the early 1990’s. He had already graduated from Princeton (as his father did before him) and grew up in an affluent part of west Los Angeles. As a true social entrepreneur, he wanted to create something back in California that would help underrepresented kids from underrepresented neighborhoods get in and through college.  Someone had given his poor immigrant father a chance to better his life as he was sent to an elite boarding school in Massachusetts as a fourteen year old from his Boyle Heights neighborhood in East Los Angeles.  Kenny saw that the great equalizer in getting more kids who would have traditionally fallen through the cracks (like his own father could have), was to get them into college, make sure they got their degrees, which would then hopefully ensure that they became more productive members of society ultimately.  This is a simplification of course, as his Harvard thesis was much more elaborate, detailed, succinct, and brilliant than this simple explanation.

Kenny Rogers created an umbrella organization in 1994 called College Kids, based in San Francisco, to serve as the incubator of the actual Institute’s that would carry out his mission in those underrepresented California communities.  Unfortunately, College Kids is no longer around to help replicate this model in California nor the rest of the country. It folded in 2000.

But before he created College Kids, he created the first Institute in East Los Angeles in 1992, called the Boyle Heights Elementary Institute (again, where his father grew up).  He started this organization himself as the founding Executive Director, and after a few years found someone locally to be its second Executive Director.  It was then that he created College Kids, the umbrella non-profit organization intended to replicate the Institute model state wide.  It was created to help new Institutes with initial fundraising, board development, and curriculum development until they too became their own 501 (c) (3) full-fledged IRS non-profit. Boyle Heights later changed its name to the Boyle Heights College Institute to reflect the fact that the goal was to get these kids in and through college, and not just focus on the “elementary” aspect of when they started recruiting kids into the program (at the time in 3rd grade). This Institute is no longer functioning unfortunately. 

He then created the same model in northern California in San Mateo in 1995, and hired its first Executive Director. It was called the North Central Elementary Institute, and it too changed its name to the North Central College Institute and followed the same format of College Kids assisting with fund raising and board development until it too became its own self-sustaining 501 (c) (3) as well.  And like Boyle Heights, it too is no longer in operation. 

The third and so far final Institute (perhaps the best!?) was created in the San Diego neighborhood of Barrio Logan in the summer of 1996.  And that is when Julio A. Galindo, as a 26 year old, was being recruited to get BLEI (later also changed to BLCI) off the ground.  Julio came to San Diego from Illinois via Tucson, AZ (where he went to train with his ILLINOIS teammates as he was a highly competitive cyclist in college ), and had directed a Youth Employment Program for the Chicano Federation of San Diego County, and afterwards worked as a Community Representative for a U.S. Congressman in San Diego. That Congressman was a 19 year old Freedom Rider (later showcased on the Oprah Winfrey show), having left Colombia University in NYC in the summer of 1961 to go to Mississippi to help folks register to vote, and was arrested with John Lewis – still a U.S. Congressman – having spent 3 months in prison at that time for “fighting the good fight.”

And so when Kenny approached Julio, while working for a U.S. Congressman, to be its first Executive Director, he had his doubts: “I have to fund raise how much money!?” and “we need to reach how many hundreds of kids!?” and “I need to recruit how many additional board members!?”  But he remembered what his 11 year old brother told him at his own Alleman Catholic HS graduation in Rock Island, IL in May of 1987: that he wanted to go to the University of Notre Dame one day himself and play soccer or basketball for them.  Unfortunately, he died two and a half months later on 8/7/87, flying off his bicycle (no helmet) 87 feet head first into a church parking lot, and just two weeks before Julio was to start his first year of college on 8/21/87. But a week after burying his brother Fabian, Julio DID go off to college, and he did graduate from the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana) in May of 1992 with a degree in Political Science and a minor in Economics. He took the five year “program” so he could race his bicycle (in many ways to honor his fallen brother) one more year as his college cycling teammates were getting ready for the ’92 Barcelona Olympics.

After deeply thinking about the opportunity that his own brother wanted and could not reach, he accepted the challenge in the summer of 1996 to get the Institute off the ground in helping the kids from Barrio Logan realize their own future dreams and aspirations.  His daily chant to the kids after every session was yelling: “who wants to go to college!!!” The model that was created by Kenny at Harvard was three fold: an After-School Enrichment Program (not a homework program, but an enriching curriculum created by UCSD & SDSU PhD’s), a Mentor Program (assign each student a college graduate mentor), and a Parent Program (educating parents who had NOT gone to college on how to best support their children in this process).

These programs were originally run out of Perkins Elementary School in Barrio Logan, with an office in downtown SD on Kettner Blvd (thanks to free office space from a corporate board member!). A few years later, Julio moved the entire operation to Barrio Logan to 1805 Main Street, kitty corner from Perkins Elementary into a large industrial warehouse.  And by the time Julio left BLCI as its founding Executive Director in May of 2001 to go get his Masters in Public Administration in NYC, BLCI had grown considerably in terms of youth/families served, employees, volunteers, board members, funds raised, and more importantly, the positive impact on each of those individuals…but it could not have existed and continued to this day if it was not for the entire local community, from students/parents, to partners, to board members, to donors and staff too numerous to name!