Leadership ISD Heroes: Ximena Antunez de Mayolo ('18)

Across Texas, our Leadership ISD COVID Heroes continue their commitment to equity and excellence for our students. Their commitment inspires us to continue to lean into this work, knowing that while the road ahead is long, the destination is worth our time and energy. Check out this week's LISD Heroes below!

Ximena Antunez de Mayolo

Tarrant County, Class of 2018

Program Officer, Rainwater Charitable Foundation

LISD: What are you and the Rainwater Charitable Foundation currently doing in response to COVID-19?

Ximena Antunez de Mayolo (XAdM): I am a Program Officer with the Rainwater Charitable Foundation. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, my mission was ensuring that we had enough accessible childcare support for families of essential workers. When we first faced the stay at home order and schools shut down, we quickly realized that people still had to go to work. Suddenly, the most prevalent providers of childcare were closed and many families don’t have the luxury to hire a nanny or have trusted family or anyone to take care of their children. At the time we had 678 childcare centers and homes (45% child care centers, 55% family child care homes) with about 8,000 seats available.

It took us about a week and a half to launch a site that would be available to anybody who lived in Tarrant County where parents could look for child care. We were able to quickly react to the crisis by leveraging our existing partnership with several large area nonprofits, including Child Care Associates, Educational First Steps and Campfire. They have amazing coaches that go into child care centers and work with them to help them improve their quality. They literally started calling every single provider in the county, over a thousand child care centers, to ask, “Hey, are you open? How many seats have you got?” They did this repeatedly, with some still making calls.

Due to this work, we have been able to provide an accurate count for families that are looking for space for their child and for them to be able to to find something that would work for their situation. It was just incredibly inspiring. We have wanted to have this resource for a while and have actually advocated for this at the legislature. The City of Fort Worth had presented a bill to create a website like this, and it didn't make it through last legislative session. However, we knew we were able to utilize private money from the Best for Kids Fund, which is contributed to by several foundations in town. It's a group that includes The Moore Foundation, The Miles Foundation, The Rainwater Foundation, Community Foundation of Texas, the City of Fort Worth, as well as Lena Pope and Child Care Associates. All of us together are able to focus on how can we better leverage business and how can we better support working parents in particular.

LISD:  HOW HAS LEADERSHIP ISD PREPARED YOU FOR THIS MOMENT?

XAdM: It's interesting, when you walk into Leadership ISD, you think that advocacy largely depends on speaking to your legislator, right? However, in many ways it's even more important to make sure that you know what what is happening at middle management levels in our agencies and working through public meetings that actually makes a difference. For example, there is a public meeting for a workforce board around child care, and it has a huge impact. They listen to folks and make change. So, our work is to make sure that at all levels of this process, our voices are being heard, and the experiences of kids are being kept forefront.

LISD: WHAT WOULD BE YOUR ADVICE TO OTHERS WHO WANT TO TAKE ACTION IN THIS TIME OF CRISIS? 

XAdM: My advice to others is there are many ways to get involved, both in person and virtually. Look around to different resources that are out there, to nonprofits that you might have worked with in the past, or to your colleagues in Leadership ISD. If your class is anything like my class, there are people from all across the community that are a part. There are definitely ways to be involved. I know if you are younger, in particular, and willing to take the risk, many of the community food banks definitely need volunteers. Catholic Charities is the organization organizing the majority of that work. But, counterintuitively, even just staying at home is contributing! I know that at this point it feels like a cliche, but for real, stay home. There are ways to be supportive. It's just a matter of understanding that the folks that are still going to work, that don’t have a choice, they need you to stay at home as much as possible and be safe. Because they're taking a risk every day. Their families are taking a risk every day. So, just be appreciative of that and be thoughtful in that space. I think that it's also possible, especially Leadership ISD folks, that you might get a call from someone who's in a cohort that's like, “Hey, you have this random skillset that we might need.” Be ready to step up in that space. Because we're having to solve a massive challenge and we have to do it together.

To help us at Rainwater, it's keeping in mind that when we talk about essential workers, it's not just hospitals. It's everybody else, too, including child care, and that these are folks that are helping raise our kids and are doing it at minimum wage, usually. They need a voice. They feel really alone. They feel like they've essentially been forgotten in the face of this crisis. I think if we can even applaud them for their work, even a little bit, because their days have not gotten any easier, they've only gotten a lot harder and a lot scarier. They are providing the care for the nurses and doctors, so they are then able to care for our folks that are ill, without worrying, because they have their child safely being cared for. For those folks that are taking care of kids in this time period, I think a shout out every once in a while to them would be awesome.

Also, if you want to write a check to Child Care Associates to provide emergency supplies to child care centers or to Educational First Steps, please do.

To learn more about the Rainwater Charitable Foundation, visit rainwatercharitablefoundation.org.