Leveraging Life Experiences: Behind a Career in Youth Opportunity and Equity

Mike Montoya: (00:00:00) Welcome to The Stronger Podcast. Each week we have honest conversation with education and social impact leaders about their leadership and career journeys. We talk about their origins, inflection points, and the work that they are doing today. The conversations are honest, human, and practical. If you are here for real stories, and real takeaways, you are in the right place. Let's jump in and let's get stronger together. Before we dive into today's conversation, I want to give a quick shout out to podcastmatter.com. Their mission is to help impact driven voices get the visibility they deserve. If you want to share your message with the world, check out their website in the show notes. Good afternoon everybody. It's wonderful to be here at the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026.

Mike Montoya: (00:00:50) I agreed with my team to do a few I call them bridge sessions to ensure that we bring some messages out to our audience as the year closes up and we head into 2026 and one of the things that our team asked was for me to share more about my personal story right and I think this has been shared and told in many places over the years but it is an important feature of the function of Stronger Consulting and the team that I built and the folks that we work with are all anchored in this basic understanding of why I do this work and so trying to keep it from being overly complicated and extensive right. I am 53 years old, right? So, the story continues, I think, is one thing that to start with, but it did start, you know, in Colorado where I grew up in Colorado Springs in the 70s back when car windows used to roll down manually and people would pump your gas for you because that is how things worked back in the day.

Mike Montoya: (00:01:45) Growing up in Colorado Springs was like both a treat and a challenge because it was such a beautiful place back then. Colorado was about maybe it was very underpopulated, right? The city I grew up in had like 200,000 people or something like that when I was a kid. And so it was pretty small as a city, but it was so beautiful because it was at the foot of the Rocky Mountains and this place called Pikes Peak, which is at the time a kind of infamous location 14,000 footer and dominated the landscape. It still does if you go back there. So it was incredible setting and a really great place to be a kid and to be outdoors and to have opportunities to be out in nature and things like that. But my story basically anchors around the reality that growing up in a small town, very Catholic family, right, with roots all the way through southern Colorado and New Mexico.

Mike Montoya: (00:02:40) And that my family was working really hard to sort of separate themselves from both an agrarian lifestyle, which was what my family's extended family would do. Like they were all farmers, right? And if you ever heard of Rocky Ford cantaloupes or things like that, that is basically where my father grew up down in Rocky Ford, Colorado. And then over time, you know, my family moved further north into the cities. And it was part of the experience of moving into a suburban type of experience where my dad was a barber, right? He got a barber's license back when that was kind of his best opportunity. And my mother was a homemaker and some my mom was also like an executive assistant. She was incredibly capable at typing. She was a very fast maybe like 96 words a minute or something ridiculous like that back on these typewriters that you used to have to pound on the keys on.

Mike Montoya: (00:03:35) So that was her first venture into the workforce as a young woman. And neither of my parents went to college because it simply was not available to them. Um if it was not affordable or was not even accessible, it was not like part of the picture, right, of kids that grew up in the 50s and the 60s, at least from those families that my parents started with. And but my parents were like super into making sure that my sister and myself had opportunities that were really about education related, right? And that we had great educations under our belt. So, they chose to move out of smaller towns, Pueblo, Colorado, Rocky Ford, up into Colorado Springs, which was like really a big city compared to that. We were not as big as Denver, but just south of Denver about an hour. And so, that experience was one of aspiration, I think, and it gave my family an opportunity to move sort of up economically, mobility wise.

Mike Montoya: (00:04:30) And so my parents were just committed to making sure we had great experiences, right? And that was exciting. And my mother was always making sure that we went to different clubs and had access to different activities and so I we basically had a full school schedule and a full afterschool schedule and a full summer schedule. We were kind of always on the go as children. And I think we had a lot of exposure to things and that was wonderful. And I think, you know, I think part of who I am today is because of some of these sports and clubs and church things that I was a part of. You know, my family at home was a little bit riddled with some strife, right? There was a lot of I call it and wonderful loving people but also had a hard time with whatever happened to them in their own childhoods, right? That were was sort of unresolved.

Mike Montoya: (00:05:25) And now we think about it as like unresolved trauma related activities that happened in childhood for them that sort of showed up as adults in kind of compromised ways, right? And I think my parents did sort of the best they could and at the same time they struggled, right, to allow those kind of coping mechanisms that they had to kind of overwhelm their family unit and so family at home was challenging. There was lots of fighting and fighting and screaming and lots of like I call it emotional and verbal attacking going on in my childhood. And so it was kind of a it felt like a now that I think about it and I reflected on it for many years, right? Like it was kind of an unsafe space or unpredictable space, right? A place that was a little hard to know what was going to happen next. And I think by the time I got into middle school and my parents got divorced, I had gravitated to these sports and school programs and after school programs. I was a boy scout.

Mike Montoya: (00:06:20) I was a swimmer. I was a member of my church group, right? And these were things that kind of kept me safe. They were more predictable spaces. They were reliable. The adults that were in those spaces were critical features to me being who I am. And I think part of that experience was really beneficial, right? I do not think I made sense of it that I was like escaping my home environment at the time, but I knew I just felt better being away and so being away was safer. And so I spent a lot of time inside my friends' houses and a lot of time, you know, in these in these programs. I basically was gone from my house like 18 hours a day or something like that by the time I got to high school. I just was intentionally kind of making space for myself.

Mike Montoya: (00:07:10) And as I got away from that experience and I headed into to college, you know, I started to pick up some of the same things that my parents were doing, which was like learning how to be a super overachiever and aspirational in ensuring that I had opportunities for myself. I went to a great university. I actually went to Boston College for my first year. I left as far away as I could. This is a good marker of my life. I left Colorado, went to Boston College, which was an acceptable school to my family because it was a Catholic school and it was on the East Coast, basically as far away as I could get. I remember choosing Boston College because they had a hockey team and the local college, it is a small local large school, Colorado College, which was in my hometown as well, had a division one hockey team and they played Boston College in division one hockey.

Mike Montoya: (00:08:05) So, I got to kind of expose myself to the idea of like, oh, there's a school far away that is acceptable to my family that I can go to. And I chose to go to Boston College, which was an incredible opportunity to break away from some of the functions and dysfunctions of my hometown. And it was also really hard to go to Boston College because it was well one very far away, two, you know, we were we were not a financially rich family, right? We had enough resources to kind of I think support my access to that through Pell Grants and other sort of student loans and things like that in Boston, which was again an opportunity area for sure and going away to a different state and then to be exposed to children from across the country that had much I call it richer developmental experiences in terms of their own academic backgrounds. Like I think my high school and middle school education was like good but not great.

Mike Montoya: (00:09:00) And I think I got there and even though I was like a top performer in my high school, I was not I guess ready for I guess I call it the higher level capacity, right, of a university setting. So I struggled my first year. I mean I think I remember taking like chemistry and calculus and just being like what the hell is going on here? Because a lot of that stuff was going over my head like working hard, doing okay but not great. And so after that first year, I transferred back to Colorado College. Back to my hometown. Where at least my environment was a little more, I call it, predictable for me again. And Colorado College was a much smaller and more intimate environment. Maybe 2,000 kids at in those schools at the school at the time, 500 kids per class. And that was that I actually got to grow up and change and expand and it was a safe environment. It was in my hometown, so I had a lot of control of my living experience and the people that I knew.

Mike Montoya: (00:09:55) I had some old friends from high school that were going to the Air Force Academy. So, I had like a friendship group that was reliable and that made me I think kind of feel safer, right, and more successful. I was still a swimmer and I still was involved in Boy Scouts. I became a scoutmaster. And it was really funny because at the time being a boy scout, it was like basically like nobody talked about being gay and being a scout leader as a gay man, even though I was not out yet at the time, was you know, it was almost like putting on my mask of course and behaving in a different way in order to you know be part of that environment that I found so valuable. I had been an Eagle Scout right so I think I had I felt comfortable being a leader and always felt like I was excited and supportive of other young people to grow and to change and to develop as people. And so the scouting experience was one of the things that I was able to continue on in my adult life.

Mike Montoya: (00:10:50) And I remember that being just such an important anchor while I was in college to be a scout leader, but also I was a swim coach, right, with a high school women's team, high school girls swimming team in the region. And so those are kind of some of the things I started to do. But this is the chain, the thread, right? The thread was like I started to get into youth development work as a result of this stuff I had experienced as a kid, went into through college, and then that youth development kind of thread became like a big piece of what I was going to do for the long term of my career, right?

Mike Montoya: (00:11:30) And so I think of myself as kind of a youth development expert by practice right I learned a lot about and this was during the time of resilience research right that was basically Bonnie Benard was one of the foundational components around youth development was the resilience research and the basics there were like when there is a significant adult in the life of a child beyond their parent group, beyond their parents, that has like one of the most protective factors, right, of a child's long-term outcomes, right? And so the goal of providing adult relationship to young people, you know, more holistic and robust way was kind of what I learned how to do, right? And so programmatically started to develop programs and activities, right, for kids and youth that were really focused on ensuring that they had really safe experiences and really strong supportive environments to grow up in.

Mike Montoya: (00:12:25) And then over time that research became richer and thicker, right? That it became really obvious that like in urban settings and in suburban settings when kids have a very connected adult in their life besides their parents, they do like remarkably better, right? Like two or three times better or more likely to have good outcomes as adults and early adult outcomes. And those features, right, became the anchor of my career. And so that was like exciting times for me. And you know, it's fun to think back on it, but it was, you know, it was not super clear to me at the time. I just knew at the time I was doing something that I loved and I cared about. I ended up being like a youth leader for one of my for a Catholic church. Again, I was still not out, but it was, you know, it was a very challenging thing to kind of thread that needle at the time, but had some amazing experiences working with children and families as a young adult in that space.

Mike Montoya: (00:13:15) I had traveled for a while with this organization called Up with People. And maybe you have heard of them. Up with People is like an international travel for the international kind of community service and performing arts organization and basically I joined the circus after college. It was my way of again expanding my horizons and getting a sense of like what was going on in the world and Up with People was you know I was with a troop of 130 other 20-somethings right running around the planet. We traveled all across North America, Mexico, the United States and Canada and then over to Europe and a bunch of Western Europe over the course of a year. Made some great friends. I grew up a lot at the time. I had a lot of things to develop and expand on myself, but I also got exposure to like a way that cultures function besides the United States and besides Colorado where I grew up. So that was like an amazing experience.

Mike Montoya: (00:14:05) Um, I worked with Up with People for a couple of years and like that was like really important anchor into my life because it gave me a sense of like hey diversity matters a lot and like my way of thinking and being is certainly a very narrow slice of the world and so the exposure to lots of people and culture. We used to stay with host families in all the cities we travel to. And that was an amazing experience because it gave me again like you learn to eat a lot of things that you never heard about.

Mike Montoya: (00:14:45) You learn to have conversations in languages that you did not know but you learned how to I call it muddle through in some cases but the ability to communicate emotions and develop relationships with people and you know decades later I would hear from some of the the children that were part of these host families right that Facebook is kind of an amazing thing like we've been able to find each other people that I stayed with for even a few days or a couple weeks in Germany, right? We've become I call it pen pals of sorts, right, on Facebook and Facebook Messenger. I mean, watching people develop as humans with their own families has been one of the great treats of that era, right? But I think these kind of foundational things that happened when I was in my 20s became my career path, right?

Mike Montoya: (00:15:35) And I think as I left Colorado and I chose to move to California, I learned that there were an endless number of children and situations that needed support and development experiences, right? Like the youth development work, right, that I was anchored in and learned as a young man really became my most valuable asset and toolkit, right? And so when I moved to San Diego and I started working for the UC University California San Diego system, we were doing enrichment programming, right, with young adults or with children, high school kids. We had a big chunk of money from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and we were doing enrichment programs for science-based learning right for young people in I call them inner city schools.

Mike Montoya: (00:16:25) These were schools like literally in the middle of San Diego that had you know children mostly largely 27 or 28 languages in this high school we were working with and they had very few life experiences right like most of these kids had never they're like four miles from the beach had never seen the ocean right and had never experienced like the parts of California that were like part of why it's so amazing to live there and so the enrichment work that we were doing. We would bring kids up to the UC San Diego campus, which is like an amazing environment in La Jolla. And the goal of this whole program work was to give them both exposure to science enrichment work, right? Like basically like how can science be more fun than just like a bunch of math problems and then also to like give them exposure to like early college experiences, right? So I got deeply enmeshed in early college pathways, right.

Mike Montoya: (00:17:15) Work to support young people from inner city schools to be working in programs that would give them opportunities, pathways into higher education, right? Because, you know, we all know that and there's a great debate now like how valuable is higher education, right? And it's sort of a ridiculous debate from my perspective is that higher education is like the number one game changer for young people who come from little or no means, right? And have families who have never gone to college, right? Like the first generation go to college like opens up a window of opportunity that does not exist. And so people who have had multiple generations of families and parents who went to college and had access to these things for you know two or three or four or five generations like of course they would have different experience than what I would have and certainly what these children I was working with in San Diego had.

Mike Montoya: (00:18:10) And I would say that on that point that continuing to open up opportunities and pathways for young people to go into higher ed to achieve and attain bachelor's degrees in a field that is valuable to them and interesting to them is like the most important thing that we can be doing as educators right now. And making sure that those pathways do not collapse and that the opportunity and the expense and the cost of those things do not kill the life opportunities of young people and their families, right? There's a lot of expense that's being like gobbled up by, you know, all the bureaucracy is a big hit, right? And I would love to see that stuff get better for children and for us to provide more opportunity for them at lower cost. I do not think the idea of like, hey, let's just train them for a trade is really a fair tradeoff.

Mike Montoya: (00:19:00) Frankly, it is very clear that especially young men are not well suited to make great life decisions when they are 18 years old, right? It does not mean that that's the wrong time to go to college. It may not be the exact right time. There is probably some work that needs to be done around supporting especially young men into the college experience in ways that fits their developmental plan as young people. Their brains are kind of crazy between middle school and 25 and they seem to settle down after about 22 or 23. And so I think there's some opportunities for us to like strengthen the kind of transition period for sure for young people and there are people doing great work. If you have not listened to the Daniel Gray podcast that is on this channel, it is worth going back and listening to what Daniel is doing in Texas, right? To basically ensure that early college opportunities are more systematically available.

Mike Montoya: (00:19:55) So this work I did in San Diego was basically like the precursor to what Daniel is doing now and it's really exciting to be parts of organizations. A lot of our clients at Stronger Consulting are doing this college pathway work and we're excited to see like some new investments from the Gates Foundation and from the I think it's Wallace probably and Walton are investing new through the StriveTogether networks, right, to do some new college pathway expansion and so that is super fun, man, because like this stuff has been hanging out for decades and we all know it works. It just takes a lot of investments. It's basically an extension of all the great stuff that people have been doing for a long time. And there's probably like efficiencies and improvements that we can be making. But I like to think about the United States as a place and land of opportunity, right? Where like second chances are always available, right?

Mike Montoya: (00:20:50) Second and third and fourth chances, the ability to remake yourself through your education and through your experiences is widely available here. And I think it's something that we can like call it all benefit from, right? All the data shows that when people attain a college degree, like they benefit society from a financial standpoint in a way that is like, you know, four or five times what they would do if they were just in high school educated kids. And certainly like the life experience of somebody who's had the opportunity to choose a career and career options that are exciting to them that provides them with a stable livelihood, but also a chance to develop a family and to do things that are, you know, beyond like, hey, let's just go to work every day.

Mike Montoya: (00:21:40) Those that is the life that we'd want for all of our kids, I think, and opposed to, for example, saying like, hey, you choose a trade and that's your job for the next 40 or 50 years is sort of a ridiculous expectation and it's certainly not one that I would put on myself and not one that I would want anybody that's close to me to have like limited choices, right? So, my argument, of course, is to say like all kids should have like as much opportunity as we can provide for them and that that should be like a top priority. If we're going to continue to have children and have families, we should be taking care of them as they grow up, ensuring that they can also move forward in their own lives, right? And there's, you know, this is going to happen regardless, right? But I think it's important that we choose as a society to invest in the future of young people, right? Because they are, you know, literally going to be the ones that support us as we get older.

Mike Montoya: (00:22:35) And now that I'm kind of rounding the corner of my midcentury, right, I'm starting to recognize, of course, that like I'm grateful to all the young people that work for my company and that work in the industry that work in the school systems that we support because without those next generations of contributors, right, educators and workers, right, there would be no like real real pathway to go forward, right? And so this is critical to me, right, that we don't lose this game, right, where we're like, hey, good enough is like getting them through high school. And that's like the number one marker, right? Like states and government needs to catch up on this point significantly like we hold school districts which have the majority of children majority of children are going to public schools, right? Like we we hold them to a high school graduation rate like hey how are you doing?

Mike Montoya: (00:23:25) How what's your graduation rate of the kids that started in kindergarten in your system and then graduated from your system at some point and that's the marker of success right and even if those graduation rates are like in the 50s or 70s we're like hey you're doing a good job and it's probably not true and I think high school graduation is like significant underestimate what the potential of young people is.

Mike Montoya: (00:23:55) Um and I think we should be measuring early adult outcomes on a more substantial level of like hey where did these kids matriculate to in terms of college did they complete college degrees have they entered the workforce in a substantial way right at what point do we measure that in a way that's got some teeth right we're not there yet but there's some policy work that needs to be done and is happening in some places some of these cradle to career network again the StriveTogether networks are really interesting doing this cradle to career work which has again been going on for you know decades now and it's important that we highlight this point because I don't think we're doing enough to ensure that we are all held accountable to providing for systematic ways for folks to transition from middle school to high school to and through college and into life right and I think that's one of the biggest challenges that's that we do not have state policy around this work, right?

Mike Montoya: (00:24:55) You know, or national federal policy around this work. And as our federal government right now, you know, the administration dismantles parts of the department of education and all these sort of efforts, right, around equity are getting pushed out into other departments or other pieces of federal government, right? The work doesn't disappear. It just continues in a different way, right? And it I think the onus is going to be more on local and jurisdictional areas of like school districts and cities and counties that are cooperating. There's these great things called promise cities or promised neighborhoods or promise kind of compacts, right? The these multi-jurisdictional compacts between the city and the state and the school district and the colleges and universities, right?

Mike Montoya: (00:25:45) And employers that are about like ensuring and promising that young people get like access to college and high quality educational opportunities after high school, right? Like we just need to keep going, right? If we want our society to be rich and rewarding for everybody, we can't cut kids off at the knees, right? Right when they're at the place of blossoming and blooming, right, after all this investment because to do so is to like basically say like, hey, go fend for yourself and they'll fend for themselves. They'll find a way, but it's not going to be necessarily the best way or a way of choice for them, right? What sometimes people fall into things, but other times they have choices. I think, you know, again, back to my story, I fell into something. I was very fortuitous, right? To fall into something so great. Um, I make a career out of it.

Mike Montoya: (00:26:30) I think I'm incredibly fortunate to basically have done something that I cared about for my entire career. And I don't know if that's the norm. I think it's not the norm, right? And I think it's something that we need to ensure that is basically all children get those chances and options, right? So, you know, I don't know. I'm going down this long road, but maybe I'll shift gears here and talk a little bit about like, you know, what of this work is right now is to ensure that like we have more choices for children that we continue to invest in ways that are supportive for them and that we invite everybody and our clients and and you know I think it's valuable if you want to spend time checking out Stronger Consulting and their website and learning about the work that we've done and the clients that we work with because imperfect as all of these systems and efforts are right none of us are knocking it out of the park none of us have got 100% of kids going to college like YES Prep probably is close right the IDEA has done a good job of getting most of their kids into college in some version or another. These are some charter networks in Texas, but they're the only ones, right? All the other schools, school districts and charter organizations are, you know, far below 100%. Right?

Mike Montoya: (00:27:25) And if we can cross the threshold of 60%. That would be amazing. I think we have a lot of work to do to go forward. And so, you know, if you're thinking about this as a career path, there's plenty of work to be done, right? And and importantly right is that we don't give up I think in many cases and work I think more diligently now because we have made incredible amounts of progress and as our society grows and changes right we need to continue to be responsive to that because that's I guess the responsibility of the elders right for the youngers right to take care of each other over time because that will circle back on us in the long term right so maybe I'll end there and welcome everybody to the new year lots of gratitude and and is kind of has in store for us. And I wish everybody as they launch into the new year and yeah, that's it. Have a great have a great start to the year. Thanks for joining us and tuning in today.

Mike Montoya: (00:27:45) To find out about other podcasts that matter, visit podcastsmatter.org. Thanks for listening to the Stronger Podcast. If this conversation inspired you, we invite you to follow the show and share it with someone who's on a journey to become a happier and healthier version of themselves. Links and resources are in the show notes. See you next Thursday, 9:00 a.m. Eastern time. Have a great day and stay strong.