Through a life shaped by family, mentors, and public education, Carmen Rojas, Ph.D. (Oakes ’00, politics) has combined her personal and professional experiences to become a leader in the hard work of building racial, economic, and social justice.
“I imagine a world where philanthropy sits at the feet of racial justice leaders,” said Rojas, President and CEO of Marguerite Casey Foundation, “and heeds from the lessons and pains that both those leaders and the philanthropy sector are learning and holding, so we can best be of service.”
Dr. Rojas grew up in East San Jose, California, the daughter of first-generation immigrants and the youngest of three children. Her brothers were significantly older than she, and she felt “like an only kid with four parents.” Her mother’s belief that things could be better for herself and for her children gave Rojas a deep sense of optimism that she carries with her today.
When she was in middle school, her brother closest to her age was incarcerated for a minor drug offense. The circumstances of this event had a profound impact on Rojas, an impact that helped to shape her values, her career, and her future. It marked the first time in her life that she questioned how things were done.
"It didn’t make sense to me that the only way we could imagine caring for people who were struggling with addiction was to put them in jail," she said. Her family’s experience of grappling with injustice and punitive systems helped spark Rojas’s lifelong commitment to questioning structures of social care and safety. It was the beginning of her journey of striving to understand and to address the deeper needs of communities.
Tragically, this brother died in the summer of 2024. “I’m doing a better job of grieving in public,” Rojas said. “I think it’s important to do that, and that we don’t think about the relationship of grief, sorrow, and leadership, they’ve been disconnected.”
Rojas became the first person in her family to graduate from high school and then enrolled in Saratoga Community College, transferring to UC Santa Cruz after two years. She credits her Saratoga Community College English teacher, in part, with helping her successfully transfer.
“I’m still in touch with that teacher. He and others were guiding lights when I was trying to make sense of a whole new world, for me, of higher education,” Rojas said.
More guiding lights were to be found at UC Santa Cruz. In addition to her course load, Rojas worked with faculty members Angela Davis, whose philosophy, like Rojas’s mother’s, embraced optimism; Sonia Alvarez, on a project researching women’s social movements in Latin America; and Manuel Pastor, on a class about Latinos in the United States. Rojas credits Michael Brown for providing a transformative educational experience and for being her favorite professor at the university.
“The professors were all people who were so committed,” Rojas said. “They did excellent scholarship and they also understood teaching is a sacred activity. I could get good feedback from my professors. That experience set the foundation for me to understand that disagreement wasn’t disparagement.”
Throughout her UC Santa Cruz years, Rojas was employed on campus in work directly related to her studies. Her first job was as a student researcher, and she almost could not believe she was getting paid to read and do research.
“My experience at UC Santa Cruz was tremendous,” she said. “It was just right for me. I learned how to write and I really learned to love to read at UC Santa Cruz.”
After graduation, Rojas was a program assistant at a Bay Area non-profit. She felt she had made it, earning a salary doing work she knew was important. Then another guiding light, a colleague who happened to share her office, asked what was next for her. Again, Rojas stretched, working in progressively more responsible positions in various non-profits. Throughout these experiences, Rojas began to see the disparities in power and influence between community members and those with advanced degrees.
“There was always someone with a doctorate coming in from Boston or Philadelphia or wherever, saying, ‘I’m a community expert and I’m going to tell you what San Jose needs,’” she said. This realization fueled her decision to pursue her own Ph.D. “I experienced a turn to wanting to be the one who was asked to talk about the places I was from,” said Rojas.
Working on her graduate degrees gave Rojas the gift of time and space to refine her thoughts about the world and how she could contribute to it. After completing a Ph.D. in city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, during which time she was a Fullbright Scholar, Rojas founded The Workers Lab, a non-profit with the mission to invest in new ideas to empower workers and support their safety, health, and security.
Just a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and during America’s national social justice movement, Rojas became President and CEO of Marguerite Casey Foundation (MCF). The Foundation’s goal is to help ensure the government follows through on its duty to ensure people have the resources, rights, and protections they need to live a dignified and meaningful life, a mission that resonates with Rojas’s lived experience, education, and career. She was positioned to meet the moment–and to do more.
Rojas challenges traditional systems of power and influence through grantmaking and also by examining and questioning established structures of philanthropy. She enacted more equitable grantmaking practices that truly support shifting power to those long excluded from having it. Rojas works hard to make MCF transparent to grant applicants and grant recipients so that the Foundation can directly confront what she calls the “black box of deservedness”. MCF grant recipients “know we're not choosing favorites,” said Rojas. “They know what’s really front of mind” for the Foundation.
One of the foundation’s key approaches is its commitment to funding local community organizations at 25% for five years, a model that provides grant recipients stability in addition to transparency. “We don’t want our foundation’s grants to be the sole way our communities change,” she said, highlighting the importance of supporting long-term systemic change alongside government involvement.
Rojas describes herself as a “servant leader,” which for her means “leading from behind, listening to the people who have the greatest proximity to the pain, to the communities, and actively seeking to create a better future for us.”
Rojas returned to UC Santa Cruz in October 2024 as a featured speaker in the “U.S. Elections Forum Series”, which is moderated and designed to foster open dialogue and engage students and the public in critical conversations about democracy, media, and voter participation.
Rojas’s journey to UC Santa Cruz and beyond demonstrates the profound impact of family, education, and mentorship on an individual’s path. She credits UC Santa Cruz with helping her understand that there is a place for everyone in the world, and in the work of making the world a better place.
“I never imagined a job like mine existed,” she said. “Now I run an organization where we give out millions of dollars to people making change in the world. UC Santa Cruz helped me understand, ‘There is a place for you,’ and I’m helping the people at the organizations we fund to understand there is a place for them and the work they’re doing.”
