Coming Full Circle: From SMART Scholar to SMART Board Member

(Fall 2026) – Isabel Garcia – a SMART alumna from the Class of 2015 and SMART’s first Program Associate – started paving her path to SMART’s board long before she knew she wanted a seat at the table. It began at home, with parents who treated education as a family value and nurtured her desire to be a lifelong learner.

Isabel got her first glimpse of college in elementary school, tagging along to her mother’s classes at City College of San Francisco, where her mom studied toward a career as an SFUSD paraprofessional. Watching her mother study for a new future was a living lesson that it’s never too late to pivot. Her father, who had started college in Mexico before financial struggles kept him from finishing, always encouraged Isabel and her sister to push themselves academically. “There was an unspoken expectation that we were going to go to college, regardless of what we wanted to study,” Isabel recalls. The only real requirement was to keep learning.

SMART found Isabel through a staff member at her elementary school who had a son enrolled in the program. He noticed how motivated both sisters were and recommended SMART. Isabel’s 4th grade teacher helped the family apply and vouched for Isabel every step of the way. Following the interviews and the acceptance came summer programming, her first taste of SMART and the start of a community that would grow alongside her.

Her cohort of about 15 students moved together from summer enrichment through the Middle School Achievement Program, and the Class of 2015 went on to become the first to pilot SMART’s College Achievement Program. Through SMART’s partnerships with independent schools, Isabel attended the Hamlin School for middle school and the Urban School of San Francisco for high school, all while staying rooted in her SMART community after school.

Ask her about her favorite SMART memories and she starts with the people: dedicated staff who are deeply invested in Scholars’ learning and success. She also remembers a budgeting workshop that had students juggle rent, books, and tuition on a limited income; the college tours, where Scholars could apply their after-school learning and picture themselves on a campus, often for the first time; and the end-of-year celebrations, where Scholars and parents gathered to honor all the work it takes to get a kid to school and help them thrive.

The road wasn’t always smooth. Like many SMART Scholars, Isabel felt the culture shock of moving from a public elementary school to a private middle school, where classmates lived in houses bigger than any she had ever seen. SMART held space for students to process that transition together and appreciate the lessons that come from interacting with people of all different backgrounds. Math and science were another hurdle. She hovered around Cs and borderline Ds until SMART pushed her to ask her teachers for help. “They wanted me to do better academically because they knew that I could.” When personal and family struggles arose, there was always an adult at SMART who would listen, vouch for her, and connect her to resources that could help.

Because she has stayed involved through every stage of her education and career journey, Isabel watched SMART change and grow over time. As SMART’s first Program Associate, she saw the program from the other side of the table. “Being an employee of SMART really taught me the importance of being a good advocate for these students.” She knew how much goes on under the radar, and how often a student just needs an extra push to speak up.

Along the way, self-advocacy became a calling, and every step she took was geared toward helping others, including teaching them self-advocacy skills. After high school, she earned an associate’s degree in sociology from City College, then took a leap to the University of Texas at Austin for a bachelor’s in sociology with a minor in educational psychology. She then did work similar to SMART’s, connecting underrepresented students to higher education before turning her attention to closing accessibility gaps in mental health care. That focus brought her to San Francisco State University for a master’s in Clinical Mental Health Counseling.

Today, she is an Associate Professional Clinical Counselor in community mental health, serving adults living with serious mental illness and co-occurring substance use disorders, and working toward her clinical license. True to her family’s love of learning, she recently signed up for training in dialectical behavior therapy tailored to people navigating substance use disorders. “As a new developing clinician, I’m learning a lot all the time,” she says. 

When the chance came to join the board, Isabel took it. SMART gave her leadership skills as a Scholar and professional skills as a staff member, and she hopes to bring all three perspectives (Scholar, staff member, and alumna) to the board. Her focus as a board member is alumni re-engagement. Following a successful Alumni Happy Hour, she is dreaming up more ways to bring alumni back: offering volunteer opportunities, encouraging alumni to share their career paths with current Scholars at the Career Conference, and planning more social events where alumni can reminisce over old SMART photos and stories together. “It’s a shared experience that we all cherish – these memories and that support system that was once there for us.”

Looking back, Isabel credits SMART with nurturing her confidence, self-advocacy skills, and proclivity towards lifelong learning. SMART is a twelve-year commitment, and seeing it through taught her what she’s capable of. “I am where I am because I had the support of SMART, but also because they allowed me to believe in myself.” Now she’s making sure the next generation of SMART Scholars has a seat at the table.