Joshua Meza—Building a Life of Leadership and Connection After a Career Crossroads

Joshua Meza is a Health Manager, Community and Network Development at Rady Children’s Hospital Foundation. He is also a graduate of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce’s LEAD San Diego.

LEAD San Diego is part of the Prebys Foundation’s BRIDGE initiative cohort, a $2 million initiative that will support nonprofit and civic leaders from across sectors working together to strengthen their organizations and communities.

Josh’s Story

“I am originally from New Orleans, Louisiana. I worked as a community affairs director, marketing director at the CBS affiliate Station in New Orleans, and then my wife and I had the opportunity to come to San Diego, and we wanted to take advantage of that because she’s from Orange County and we have a lot of family who are here. It was a good opportunity for us to be closer to her family and for our kids to experience their cousins on a much more often basis than just Christmas.

We moved here and I got the position of Community Affairs Director for the CBS station here, which is KFMB, CBS 8. And it’s tough to be a community affairs director, when you don’t know anybody or anything about the community. 

I would go to all these galas and these banquets and everybody who went up on stage, these keynote speakers, would talk about how they got their foray in San Diego from the LEAD program. And how most of them, if not all of them, attributed at least part of their success to the people they met and the experiences they learned from of the program. 

So, I knew this was something I needed to do. 

LEAD San Diego is just a tremendous program for people like me or any professional looking to take that next step in leadership.

And not just leadership within a company, but leadership in the community. LEAD puts you in a room with 49 other people just like you, who are all in this stage in their career, where they can make a huge difference if they just work together.

It really was a crash course for me. It’s a ten-month program. We met on the third Thursday of every month. We learned about the homelessness crisis in San Diego, the cross border regional benefits, disadvantages, opportunities, strengths, weaknesses, all of that. We participated in tremendous seminars, we went onto the Navy base to get a really good look at why the military is so important to the region. We visited the Otay Sustainability Park with Republic Services, where we got to walk around the landfill and see all the stuff they’re taking and all the challenges they face when it comes to sustainability in the region and why it’s so important. 

Anything you can possibly want to know about San Diego, you can.

Veronica and her team put the best and brightest people in front of us to give us insight into things that we would normally not get. And that gave all of us in that room a perspective that, I think a lot of people really should have, and that is learning from others and growing stronger because we’ve learned from their experiences. 

And that’s one of the cool things about LEAD, people come from different industries and roles. There are HR people, there are people like me, businesspeople, engineers. And they all bring something special to these equations so that ultimately, when we get together, we can have these discussions, and these relationships that we build can really change the region, and I think it’s amazing. 

My transition from media was very difficult and it was made a lot easier because of LEAD. 

Halfway through the program, my position with CBS 8 was eliminated. I was on month five of this 10 month program. And this is the first time in my life I wasn’t employed. A lot comes with that. There are the responsibilities you have as an adult. I have two young children and a wife that rely on me — and it was really tough. 

And the people who helped me most were the people in the LEAD, who were strangers five months prior. And had now become my lifeline. I would have a big interview coming up and I would have someone from my cohort offer to give me a mock interview because it had been so long since I had done a real interview. Another person said ​“send me your resume. I will go through it with my leadership team. We will look at it and let you know what we think.”

And the support I got from that group of strangers was just tremendous. I ultimately got this position at Rady Children’s hospital because of some prior relationships I’ve had with the foundation.

They ended up being three out of four of the references I needed for this job. 

Halfway through the LEAD program, they do Leadership Action Team (LAT) Projects. 

They bring in nonprofits that request support and we choose, I think, seven of the nonprofits who apply for this help. And then those nonprofits come in and they pitch their needs to the 50 people in the LEAD class.

So we had a lot of great opportunities with the San Diego Tourism Authority Foundation, the Children’s Museum of Discovery, which I think is in Escondido. There were a few others and one was OAK, Oncology and Kids, the Media Arts Center, and San Diego Fire-Rescue Foundation. And the presentation that the executive director of OAK gave was passion-filled, and you can sense it. And it really impacted me. It impacted all the people who chose OAK. There were 12 of us who ended up being the LAT team for OAK. And we were all really responding to that passion that we saw from the executive director when he pitched why his nonprofit really needed some help. 

They just don’t have the people. They have all this stuff, they have a base, they have people who have been to camps that they do. They do these huge camps every year for these kids, and they have support, not just for the kids, but the families of these kids going through terrible times. OAK needed support to streamline their ambassador program to bring in alumni to help with either donations or to donate their time to help keep the nonprofit running smoothly and help give these kids a place where they can feel normal and a little relief and meet people who are going through the same things at the same time as they are. 

So, our group had a lawyer, the HR director for a nonprofit, businesspeople from SDGE, and we came up with a communications plan, an outreach plan, a streamlined document plan, a fundraising plan — all these things to help out OAK.

I was fortunate enough to come from the TV side. And we know that OAK really needed more notoriety. So, I was able to recruit one of my old producers at CBS 8 to create some broadcast-ready PSAs for OAK that are now running on COX TV and will probably be running local stations soon. And it’s just to build awareness and to remind people who may have gone through that program is still running and needs support. 

I loved the LAT Project, we were all leaders coming together to learn and listen to each other. The whole process changed my life dramatically. It gave me confidence. It made me feel like I could be myself. 

Everyone was so different, their upbringings made them who they were. Their work experience, their life experience all made them who they are, and we’re all working together to make San Diego better. 

At Rady Children’s Hospital Foundation I work with an incredible team of fundraisers making sure people understand how important the foundation is. When I start talking to people, the first thing that everyone responds with is ​“why does that hospital need money?” 

And the reason is that insurance just covers the medical side of things. But when you have a kid in a hospital, they are dealing with so much. There are so many emotional challenges associated, so many unpredictable things, that if they had a distraction, a book, a toy, even a canine therapy program, which we’re working really hard to establish here. Those things aren’t covered by insurance, but they are very much needed by the kids who are at this hospital.

My son, when we first moved to San Diego, turns out he needed a heart surgery. He was about eight years old. And that was my first experience with Rady’s. They went through his back, they had to cut his artery, they repaired it with some gortex, they did incredible work. And I saw firsthand the first class help that these kids were getting. And it wasn’t just the kids, my wife, daughter, and I were treated so well. 

From that day, I thought to myself that I would love the opportunity to work here. And I think it worked out really well, because I now get to lead a team that goes out there to try to help improve the patient experience for all our kids here at the hospital. So it’s really a great opportunity for me because I get to see these kids working so hard just to get healthy, and they just need a break. And that’s kind of what I’m in charge of, figuring out a way to raise funds to ensure these kids have the best experience possible during the toughest parts of their lives.

Our class has grown stronger and closer since our graduation. For instance, on one day, I had lunch a classmate who works for the San Diego Water Authority. On that same day, I was asked to write a letter of recommendation for another person who was moving on to another job. And then that night went to a Padres game with a former classmate to talk about how we can improve the relationship between nonprofits and corporate San Diego to make everyone’s lives better. And it all happened in one day and it all happened because of LEAD. 

And I just can’t say enough about it. And I think ultimately, the more we grow together, my class in particular, the more we can help the community. And then that’s not even talking about the 4,000 alumni. LEAD gets you in front of people that you normally wouldn’t be in front of. And it’s vital. 

I always say that I think a first-class city needs a first-class program to help grow its future leaders and LEAD is it. 

This profile is a feature for People de San Diego, a storytelling project by the Prebys Foundation highlighting valuable community members of San Diego County.