Farewell NCCPC from Mer Curry Nuñez

I sent the following email to NCCPC's members and partners on Friday, October 17, 2025.

Dear Friends, Colleagues, and Partners: 

Today, October 17, 2025, is my last day as the Executive Director of the Northern California College Promise Coalition (NCCPC). Serving community and education leaders from Sacramento down to Fresno has been a profoundly rewarding experience and one of the most incredible journeys of my life. I am deeply grateful for the trust and confidence the NCCPC Steering Committee invested in me throughout my five-plus-year tenure, and my heart overflows with gratitude and appreciation when I think of our shared accomplishments. 

It is particularly gratifying to note the advancement of policies, partnerships, and practices that have provided substantial support to local, regional, and statewide organizations that make up the membership of our coalition, from the Bay Area down to the Central Valley. Together, we centered and served over 300,000 first-generation, low-income, and multiply marginalized and underrepresented students across our footprint by co-creating solutions, piloting programs, and sharing resources. 

I am grateful to have collaborated with such passionate, devoted, resourceful, and community-centered partners and to have served under the distinguished leadership of our Steering Committee and Advisory Council.

Most of all, I am grateful for the countless hours of dedication and work of NCCPC’s backbone team, both those who are still here and those who invested early in providing a collective impact infrastructure for our members to engage in. Our staff, members, and partners helped us transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of students across the state during and after the pandemic. As we face yet another crisis in our state, country, and world due to shifting policies and practices, NCCPC serves as a trusted source of information, a safe space where hope can endure, and a vital network that facilitates meaningful relationships and pathways for success.

We launched several toolkits, providing hundreds of practitioners in our ecosystem with trusted information to share with students and families about child savings accounts and college financial literacy. We championed local and regional partnerships that embed the value of education in local governments and elevate partnerships to eliminate poverty and enhance quality of life with our Education Cities Initiative. We piloted an Emergency Microgrants Program for the last three years to support our members’ scholars with a financial safety net when affected by unforeseen financial challenges. We enabled the passage of legislation to ban scholarship displacement in California and developed Know Your Rights Toolkits for students, colleges, and scholarship providers. These toolkits ensure that over one million students can maximize every dollar they earn and are qualified for. We learned so much in the process, made a difference, AND got results, TOGETHER.

To Justher Gutierrez and Melissa Fries, I have depended on each of you to bring your strengths, skills, and expertise to the table, enabling solutions and facilitating committees that work for our members. Thank you for answering the call and bringing your best self every single day for the benefit of our members. This thanks goes out to all of NCCPC’s past staff, too!

To my fiercely committed partners in this work, Chair David Silver and Vice Chair Angela Bugayong - you are the greatest advisors and supervisors that an executive could ask for, and it’s been a privilege and pleasure to lead with you. 

To the co-chairs who have led our committees, past and present, THANK YOU for investing even more of your leadership and expertise into our coalition’s pillars and activities. Because of you, what we do at NCCPC is truly for members, BY members.

To the Advisory Council members who champion our coalition’s work and our members from your leadership roles in higher education, public office, and advocacy, I appreciate your guidance and collaboration over the years.

To every member, partner, and ally I have had the pleasure of meeting over these five-plus years — and those I didn’t meet but who have leveraged the work of our coalition — THANK YOU for how you show up in the world and how you lead every day. Our students wouldn’t be here without you.

I am grateful for the flowers that NCCPC and I are receiving this month in recognition of all of our collective efforts over nearly six years as a coalition! Next Thursday in Campbell, NCCPC will receive the Silicon Valley Business Journal’s 2025 Community Impact Award. Then, on the 30th in San Francisco, I am honored and humbled to be recognized as one of the Most Influential Filipina Women in the World by the Filipina Women’s Network Foundation.

As I look to the months ahead, I am looking forward to new opportunities to serve the San Jose and Silicon Valley communities, such as in my new role as a Co-Chair for the Black Leadership Kitchen Cabinet of Silicon Valley and the inaugural Board Secretary for LEAD Filipino. 

I am grateful to know you, proud to be part of this ecosystem, and privileged to continue serving so that our students can live with dignity, purpose, security, and joy, as they deserve.

With gratitude always,
Mer Curry Nuñez