Tina Fernandez is an integral part of Bellwether’s story. Early in co-founding the organization, I reached out to Tina, a lawyer and my former college roommate, to ask for help in filing our new organization’s legal paperwork. Fernandez was inspired to learn about Bellwether’s mission and not only took on the task of filing Bellwether’s 501(c)(3) papers, but also joined the board of directors on Day 1.

In 2014 she left the board to join Bellwether full-time and co-lead the organization’s work on building talent-ready and effective education organizations. Tina rejoined the Bellwether board in 2015 and went on to be the founding director of Achieve Atlanta.

Tina recently stepped down from Bellwether’s board. In her 15-year tenure, she made a lasting impact on the organization and our mission to ensure an equitable and excellent education for all young people. She sat down with me to talk about why she cares about this work, what she learned from her time at Bellwether, and what lies ahead for the education sector. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Mary Wells: What initially drove you to put your life’s work into the education sector?

Tina Fernandez: I grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and went to the one public high school in my community. I always loved school. I got to Harvard in 1990 and felt like I was at Disneyland. Soon, I realized that most of my classmates had had very different experiences growing up than I did. There were very few people who looked like me and who came from communities like mine. I began to look for a place where I could feel a sense of belonging and be myself. 

I found it through public service. During the summers in college, I ran day camps in the South End of Boston for kids who lived in low-income housing. I loved working with the kids and their families. There are brilliant kids everywhere, and I enjoyed the experience of unlocking their brilliance, exposing them to new ideas, and seeing them step into their full potential. 

After college, I knew I wanted to pursue social justice work. There were two paths I thought about taking. One was to go to law school, and the other was to apply to teach in what was then a new organization called Teach For America (TFA). I applied to both, and ended up choosing TFA.

I taught fourth and fifth grades in the South Bronx of New York for two years and the experience cemented this path for me. I had already personally experienced the transformational power of education along with inequities in my own academic journey. When I found myself in front of a classroom with students and families going through the same ups and downs I had, I was hooked.

My career has taken a lot of twists and turns since then. I did end up eventually going to law school, but I’ve always had a passion for making sure young people have access to opportunities that allow them to live to their fullest potentials.

MW: After college, you were working at the University of Texas law school when I was living in Austin, so we were serendipitously living in the same city again. During that time, I had this big idea with Monisha Lozier and Kim Smith to found Bellwether. (Andy Rotherham joined this group shortly after.) I distinctly remember telling them, “I’m going to call up my friend Tina, who’s a lawyer, and ask if she has recommendations for people who might help us with the 501(c)(3) filing —  and hopefully she’ll offer to do it.”

TF: You know, it worked pretty well, Mary!

MW: It did! Let’s jump ahead just a little. How did you formally get involved with Bellwether?

TF: At the time, I was a young mom thinking about what my career was going to look like. You, Monisha, and Kim wanted to do this work in a way that also made sense for your lives. That model generated a lot of possibilities for people to not only be able to do great work, but also to have families or other things they were interested in outside work.

I thought the idea for Bellwether was fascinating and I wanted to figure out how to be a part of it. There wasn’t an obvious way, because I was a lawyer, and I hadn’t done management consulting. When you asked if I would do the 501(c)(3) filing, I jumped at the opportunity because I knew it might be a way for me to get connected to an organization that’s doing really amazing things.

I could never have imagined the friendships and the opportunities I ended up getting from being part of the Bellwether family. It has been a foundational part of my career development. 

MW: It’s officially our 15th year, and you wrote those 501(c)(3) papers even longer ago than that. As you think back, how have you seen Bellwether grow and evolve?

TF: From the beginning, Bellwether quickly became a real, trusted partner for organizations in the education sector who were trying to increase their impact. Many of them were run by people who had come out of teaching and were scaling their new organizations quickly, but who didn’t have experience in the business side of building an organization. Partnering with Bellwether allowed them to become strong and sustainable, and a lot of those organizations still exist.

Bellwether also became an incubator for talent and for new ideas. Watching the number of people in the Bellwether family grow and diversify has been incredible. Today, it’s a far-reaching national nonprofit with sustainable revenue and top talent doing great work. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, all the systems were in place to weather the unexpected. Bellwether came out of the pandemic in good shape and continued to grow afterwards. I think that’s a testament to the organization’s strength.

MW: There are so many former Bellwarians populating different pockets of leadership around the country. One of the things that I love most is hearing how they use what they learned at Bellwether in their new roles. How did you apply your experience at Bellwether when you became the founding executive director of Achieve Atlanta?

TF: I didn’t go to business school, so my time working full-time as a partner at Bellwether from 2014 to 2015 was a crash course in strategic operations and the design and running of an organization. It was invaluable when I was starting and launching Achieve Atlanta, and remains invaluable as I move on to my next venture. 

There were two things that I came to realize. One, you have to believe in the thing that you’re selling. You have to believe in your product. Two, you have to believe in yourself. As a consultant, you’re selling your own ability to help somebody else do the thing that they’re struggling with. That takes self-confidence and forces you to think: “I have something to add. I have a point of view. It’s valuable. I know how to do things and I’m going to do those things for other people.” That’s a huge growth point that I took from Bellwether.

MW: How have you seen the education landscape change over the course of your career?

TF: I’ve been a part of a cohort of education reformers since I was very young. A lot of us started at organizations like TFA. We were idealistic and ambitious. We wanted to take on huge, systemic problems head-on. As we worked, we realized it was a lot more complicated than we originally thought. We assumed that providing kids with access to great teaching and access to great schools would be enough. At a certain point, I think we realized that we needed to understand systems better and the bigger context.

There are so many things that contribute to a child’s ability to live to their fullest potential: their home environment, their family’s economic situation, systemic racism and oppression, brain development, nutrition, and more. As a cohort, my peers and I have been able to elevate the conversation, understand the complexities, grow into leadership positions, and then develop and mentor the next group of leaders to continue this work.

MW: Is there a message that you want to leave for future Bellwether board members and current and future leaders of our team?

TF: One of the founding principles of Bellwether was “viewpoint diversity.” You’ve got to bring multiple perspectives and orientations to an idea to be able to find the best solution. Bellwether remains one of the few places where those conversations can still happen. The objective is finding the most efficient, impactful, and accessible solution given the contexts. It’s noteworthy that Bellwether can maintain that culture as the country becomes more polarized.

Bellwether has worked with so many organizations and has a bird’s-eye view over the entire education system. Because of that, Bellwether knows some things. I’m excited for the organization to start sharing more of that wisdom after many years of learning. 

We’re in an era where leadership is getting more and more complicated, and it’s easy to get burned out and depleted when trying to do good in the world. I’m focused on how we help develop, support, and sustain values-based leaders who also have stores of energy, resilience, inspiration, joy, and connection, so that they can stay in this fight. I hope that the leaders and future leaders of Bellwether can find that for themselves. I’m super excited for this next era.