Pay It Forward

“Pay it forward.” My dad has said that to me for as long as I can remember, and for most of my life I understood it as a nice thing that dads say. He spent much of his career as a CIO at Silicon Valley companies and did well during the dot-com era, and one of the things he did with that was get involved with the CIO Scholarship Fund, a nonprofit started by technology leaders to support students and connect schools with people actually working in the industry. Over the years that fund has raised well over a million dollars.

I grew up around it without thinking about it very hard. It is only really since joining the Ohlone College Foundation Board in 2019 that I think I’ve understood what he actually meant.

The lesson from him that stuck with me most wasn’t about generosity at all. It was about arithmetic. At some point there was a conversation about where the money should go, and whether it should go to the bigger universities – Stanford and schools like it. My dad’s reaction was basically: does Stanford really need another $100,000? They’ll take it, of course. You’ll get a very nice thank-you letter and your name in a program. But at an institution with that kind of endowment, $100,000 is a rounding error, and the same $100,000 somewhere that actually needs it is a completely different thing.

That was never a criticism of Stanford. It was a point about impact, and about being honest with yourself regarding whether you’re giving to help or giving to be seen helping.

That is a large part of why community colleges make so much sense to me. The Ohlone College Foundation is the nonprofit auxiliary that raises private support for Ohlone College – scholarships, student programs, equipment, whatever the college needs that the budget doesn’t cover. A lot of schools have an organization like this sitting alongside them, and most people have no idea they exist.

I’m a volunteer member of the board of directors. Nobody is paid. We sit in meetings and talk about fundraising and budgets and program allocations, and honestly, a lot of it is about as glamorous as it sounds.

And then every so often a student comes into the room, and that’s the part that stays with me. They’ll talk about what a scholarship meant to them, or what it meant to get into a program, and suddenly the numbers on the agenda stop being numbers. Sometimes they’re the first person in their family to go to college. Sometimes they’re working while they study, or supporting a family, or navigating an educational system that nobody around them has been through before.

Ohlone serves over 16,000 students a year, and since 2021 the Foundation has awarded more than $740,000 in scholarships, helping more than 350 of them. We also fund things that are less visible than a scholarship: embedded tutors, professional development, equipment, building improvements. Those are good numbers and I’m proud of them, but they don’t explain anything on their own. A few thousand dollars on paper is just a few thousand dollars.

What that money actually does is buy somebody another semester. That semester gets them closer to a degree or a transfer, the degree opens a door, and that door leads to a job or a profession or a relationship or an opportunity that nobody could have predicted at the moment the check was written.

We talk constantly in business and in startups about how money scales things – you put resources into something that works and the resources let it reach further. Education does the same thing, except the return doesn’t stop at the first transaction. A scholarship can pay dividends across one student’s entire life. A program pays dividends across a whole school, because cohort after cohort uses what was built. The CIO Scholarship Fund did exactly that at Ohlone years ago: money went into the computer science and technology programs, including an embedded tutoring program and a permanent STEM endowment, and it kept doing work long after the check cleared.

A few weeks ago I went to the dedication of the Suzanne Lee and Steve Chan Learning Hub at Ohlone’s Fremont campus. Sue and her husband, Dr. Steven Chan, gave more than $100,000 to create a space for students to study, collaborate, and get academic help.

I took a photo with some of the people there, and I keep coming back to it, because the people in that photo are a decent answer to the question of what public service actually looks like. Sue has spent years in public service – Fremont City Council, now an Ohlone trustee, and statewide leadership in California’s community college system. Rakesh Sharma has given years to the Foundation and founded Indo-Americans for Better Community, and he’s a trustee now too. Charles Sasaki, as Ohlone’s superintendent and president, has the daily job of actually running the institution.

Here is what I’ve come to appreciate about people like that: nobody sees the part that takes the time. People see the ribbon cutting. They don’t see the board packet, the committee meeting, the fundraising call, the budget discussion, the public comment period, or the hours sitting in a room while somebody explains at length why they think you’re wrong.

I’ve run for office myself, so I don’t romanticize any of this. People have egos. People have interests. People make decisions I strongly disagree with. And people will still talk shit about you – that’s just part of public life. But nobody sits through endless trustee meetings because it’s an efficient way to get rich. Most of the people I’ve met doing this care about where they live and want to leave it better than they found it, and after a while that starts to look genuinely admirable rather than merely nice.

Which brings me back to the part of “pay it forward” that I think is easiest to miss: you do not have to donate $100,000. Some people give money, sure. But some people organize the event that raises the money, and some people call the sponsors, and some people mentor a student, and some people serve on a board, and some people just volunteer at the golf tournament.

The CIO Scholarship Fund has run an annual golf fundraiser for years and Ohlone has its own long-running one, and growing up around that I realized fairly early that philanthropy is almost never the single person whose name ends up on the building. There’s an entire chain of people who make the result possible, and most of them are invisible in the photograph.

Sometimes your contribution is much smaller than any of that. A student messages you and asks if you have thirty minutes for an informational interview. Take the call if you have the capacity. You don’t have to give them a job, you don’t have to become their mentor for life, and you probably can’t solve whatever they’re actually worried about. Maybe all you do is answer one question honestly, or tell them something you wish somebody had told you five years earlier, or introduce them to one person, or point at a path they didn’t know existed.

That can be enough. I can immediately name people who did some version of that for me, and I’d bet most people can, and I’d also bet those people have no idea they’re on anyone’s list.

There’s an obvious limit to all of this, and I believe in it too. The airplane instruction is correct – put your own oxygen mask on before helping someone else. You cannot give away time, money, or energy that you genuinely do not have, and nobody is served by you wrecking yourself to be generous. You have to build your own life first. Sometimes saying no now is what makes it possible to say yes later.

But when you do have capacity, I think it’s worth asking what you can pass along. Maybe it’s money, maybe it’s experience, maybe it’s access, maybe it’s an idea, maybe it’s half an hour.

My dad happened to teach me this through schools and scholarships, so education is where it has become most tangible for me – I get to sit in Foundation meetings and see students on the other side of the equation, and I get to meet people who have given years of their lives to a college and a community. That’s why I love giving back to schools. Not only because education matters, though it does, but because schools make the whole idea visible. You can actually watch one opportunity turn into another.

Someone helped you get here. When you can, help somebody else get somewhere too.