How to level the playing field for college access in America #41

Hi Everyone and Welcome Back!

This week on The Nick Halaris Show we are featuring non-profit leader, Ibert Schultz.  Ibert is the Executive Director of Black College Success, an organization committed to increasing opportunities through college access and career success for Black high school students.  He’s a dedicated activist and public servant with a long, diverse track-record of success working to create a better world.  He’s also a great friend.  We met a few years ago while volunteering for our kids’ school and became fast friends, bonding over many things, but especially our shared values around citizenship and public service.

Ready to dive in? Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and YouTube or on your favorite podcast platform.

I wanted to have Ibert on the show to highlight the important work he and his colleagues at Black College Success are doing and to get his perspectives on some of the pressing issues of our day.  As you’ll see in the episode, Ibert is someone who’s thought very deeply about our society, culture, and government and has a ton of really compelling ideas.  In this fascinating episode, we discuss:

  • What it’s like to grow-up in an environment where racially motivated police activity is a common occurrence and how that shaped his desire to be a public servant

  • Why education still represents the best hope for the survival of the American Dream

  • The implications of the post-affirmative action world and why college access is something we should be thinking very seriously about if we truly care about creating opportunities for all Americans

  • What’s working and not working in the DEI movement

  • The demonstrated empirical benefits of diversity in business and organizational performance

  • & Much, much more

Stay tuned to the end to hear how Ibert’s mom provided the powerful example for his lifelong dedication to civic activism and public service and helped him find the courage to sign-up for a stint with the Peace Corps in rural Nicaragua in lieu of the higher paying corporate job track.  Ibert also makes a compelling argument about the relationship between economic insecurity and the decline in civic engagement and participation.

As always, I hope you all enjoy this episode.  Thanks for tuning in!      

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Nick Halaris

I’ve been fascinated by investing for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I would read the Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Barron’s, pouring over the data tables, stories and interviews with a passion and an insatiable kind of curiosity. As I grew into adulthood, I struggled to find the right outlet and channel for this passion and spent much of my twenties wandering and trying out different things. I had a very brief career as an attorney, spent some time as a strategy and leadership consultant for big multinational companies, failed in an attempt to start a hedge fund, and even ended up helping run a scrap metal recycling operation for a while.

At the age of 30 though, I took my stand. I made up my mind that no matter what I was going to be an entrepreneurial investor. As crazy as it sounds, I owe everything in my life to this one foundational decision—even my amazing wife and my beautiful kids. I don’t think I would ever have met Alicia had I not made this one choice. At that moment in time, the financial world had just been devastated by the crash in the housing market and the near systemic failure of the global banking system that followed. I’ve always had a contrarian bent to my investment thinking; so, to me the carnage in real estate looked like an opportunity.

It all started with one house in Compton California. The business plan was simple: buy a distressed foreclosed home from a bank, bring it back to life with a big renovation and sell it to a first-time homebuyer. Things progressed slowly as they tend to do with real estate. In the first years of this, I think I did 6-7 homes. But then after plugging away day-by-day, suddenly it seemed, things just came together. I found the right investors and the right loans and the right deals and in just a few short years I ended up investing in over 100 such transactions, building a portfolio of almost 2,500 multifamily units and creating a fully vertically integrated real estate company with almost 100 employees.

Fast forward to today and I’m running the second evolution of my entrepreneurial investing career and having so much fun that I have to stop and remind myself that this is all real.

http://www.nickhalaris.com
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The pressing need for transparency, accountability and competition in our economy #42

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How to make immigration work for America #40