My MLT Story: How the Era we are Living in Today is a Dream Come True

Pavel Sandoval, MLT Career Prep 2014

Over two years ago I asked myself, why is there a lack of LGBT people of color in leadership roles? It was frustrating growing up as a gay Latino trying to find a role model. My dream was to become a leader as a LGBT person of color. Yet, I got to the point where I was so frustrated and wanted to quit pursuing my goal because the society I lived in didn’t actively support it.

Every day I spent researching to feel empowered, the more disillusioned I became by the bombardment of statistics on how bad the odds were stacked against me. I found out that only 15% of Latino LGBTs graduate college, 47% of Latino LGBTs are harassed in school, I had a 54% chance of being homeless as a LGBT person of color, and I was the most at-risk for violence as 80% of all anti-LGBT attacks target people of color. I had a greater probability of dropping out, harassment, homelessness, and exposure to violence, than I ever would of graduating college, much less become a rising leader. Yet, I had a vision for myself greater than all these reasons of why I wouldn’t make it.

One day in March of 2013 I found an organization called Management Leadership for Tomorrow. I saw they had a program called Career Prep. However, I thought to myself, would they accept a gay 17-year-old rising junior in college? I seriously questioned if I was too different to get the support I needed to become a rising leader. Nevertheless, I was determined to find out and I applied because I knew that even if I was the first one, at least hopefully fellows in the future would realize their age or sexuality isn’t an impediment to becoming a future leader.

As a result I became Career Prep’s youngest fellow. I was as excited as I was scared. It seemed impressive I got in so young, but I knew that the MLT experience was much more than simply arriving. I had to master the winning playbook and adapt to the coaching. In the beginning of the program I struggled because I had always learned to be self-sufficient. It was hard to adapt being expressive and asking for guidance when I needed it, but having Coach Andrea helped me grow the confidence and self-awareness to assess when I needed to ask for help and when I needed to own my experience. Additionally, it was eye opening to question who I was, what my passions and gifts were, and what really drove me as a person at every seminar. As a LGBT young man of color my entire life all I knew was that society devalued me and that I was never expected to bring value to this world, much less help drive the future, but MLT viewed me in a different light.

At first, I tried to mold myself into a career that I thought society valued and would therefore value me for doing. However, it felt empty and like I was cheating myself into a life-changing experience that looked good on the outside, but could never impact the change I was looking for. As the months went by I realized that just because society devalued me didn’t mean I had to devalue myself. I came to realize that I didn’t have to mold myself into a pre-fabricated person to be accepted by society when MLT and so many of its corporate partners valued the genuine talents and personality I brought to the table.

With that in mind, I began to explore my career through an introspective lens and paradoxically found it even harder to do. I noticed that the obstacles to leadership I came to face were more self-imposed than I had previously thought. I used to think the world wasn’t ready for a leader like me, but then I slowly realized the reality was that I wasn’t ready to take on the world as a leader. Undeniably there are structural problems for LGBT youth of color to become successful leaders, but I realized through MLT that in the final stretch it becomes more about personal agency than structural inequities. Structural inequities will always be there, but the decision to stand with an unwavering conviction and passion against a world that doesn’t fully accept me is what is going to make me a leader. A sense of agency and ownership is what I needed. I needed to understand myself before the world understood what I was all about.

I sit here two years later and I realize that with MLT I genuinely got to a place that was life changing, not simply because my life is different than before, but because my life was changed in a profound way that allows me to be the leader that only I could be. That included taking ownership in and outside of the program. Outside of the program, I genuinely surprised myself when I took ownership for my education and I became the youngest first-generation LGBT Underrepresented Minority to graduate the University of Washington-Seattle with baccalaureate honors, cum laude, at 19. Two years ago I went to community college and I thought academia wasn’t ready for something like that to occur, but it was never whether they were ready, it was about taking the initiative when no one else had done it before. Inside the program the impact was just as profound for my career. By taking ownership throughout Career Prep it led me to become the youngest LGBT Underrepresented Minority Manager at Disney and frankly the entire Fortune 100 when I became a Guest Service Manager in the Operational Leadership Development Program at Walt Disney World this summer at age 19. Two years ago, I didn’t think the Fortune 100 was ready for a teenage LGBT person of color to take a leadership role, but it was never whether they were ready, it was about taking the initiative when no one else had done it before.

So to quote Walt Disney, how is it that “the era we are living in today is a dream coming true?” Two years ago I asked myself why there was such a profound lack of leaders who are LGBT people of color and I solidified my dream of becoming one. Yet, I knew the odds were stacked against me and I took the risk to change it because I didn’t want the world we were living in to stay the same. Thankfully I was able to partner with MLT and I explored a journey that would enable me to become a rising leader as a gay Latino. But the dream is this: in a world where society devalues me, MLT and Disney cherished me, and now there’s a world where a LGBT person of color can become a rising leader and to me that’s an era where a dream is coming true.