Herman G. Hernandez has ambitious plans for one of Sonoma County's most visible Latino leadership nonprofits.
You might say that Herman G. Hernandez has some big shoes to fill.
Before becoming the executive director last year of Los Cien, the Latino social equity and leadership nonprofit, his father, Herman J. Hernandez, was one of the founders of the organization. The elder Hernandez, now 72, was among a dozen leaders in the local Latino community who launched Los Cien in 2009 and wore almost every hat for the group over the years—from chair of the organization on down to the person who’d email meeting announcements.
The younger Hernandez, 37, says the purpose for starting Los Cien—which translates to “The 100”—was that in the early 2000s, his father and other Latino leaders were regularly sought by elected officials for meetings and advice on how to better engage the Latino community and hear out their concerns on local issues. “One of the things they realized is that they kept inviting the same five to 10 people and they [began to wonder]—what kind of connections do our local politicians have with other Latino communities?”
And so his father and others began hosting meetings with local elected officials and candidates for office—while opening the meetings to other leaders in the Latino community. The first meeting took place at a Mary’s Pizza Shack where the group interviewed Sonoma County Sheriff candidate Steve Freitas, who’d go on to win the seat and serve most of two terms.
From that point on, the backroom at Mary’s was the group’s go-to place to engage political candidates and elected officials.
Los Cien took on an even larger voice in the community in the aftermath of the 2013 killing of 13-year-old Santa Rosa-resident Andy Lopez, who was shot seven times by Sgt. Erick Gelhaus. The officer believed the toy airsoft rifle Lopez was wielding was a real gun.
In the days following the tragedy, Los Cien hosted a community forum to address the public outcry and protest over the alleged lack of oversight of local law enforcement—notable attendees included Freitas, then-District Attorney Jill Ravitch and Santa Rosa Police Chief Tom Schwedhelm. At that meeting, says Herman G. Hernandez, “they realized that we should be having conversations that are bigger than just the elected officials and more on local issues and how they impact the Latinx and the Hispanic community.”
Soon after, Los Cien held its inaugural State of the Latino Community Address—an annual conference focused on Latino issues—and began hosting monthly community luncheons at the Flamingo Hotel that focused on such concerns as voter registration, the environment, education, access to healthcare and other issues that were plaguing Sonoma County. Meanwhile, Los Cien has continued to grow.
A new generation
Working in the nonprofit sector wasn’t originally in the younger Hernandez’s plans. While growing up, his father—a longtime real-estate agent in Guerneville—used to bring him to business-community events, like at the Rotary Club of Russian River. From a very young age, his father instilled in him and his sister, Daniela, the Rotary motto, “service above self” and showed them what community service was and why it mattered. “I personally value the purpose of volunteering in the community,” he says. “But I also love the relationships you build through service.”
Hernandez was studying international business at San Diego State University when Los Cien first started. In fact, he says he never envisioned working for a nonprofit, let alone becoming the group’s executive director. “Honestly, what I love about what we do now is that we’re trying to change the perspective of people—like me—who were not engaged in what was going on locally at a young age,” he says. “I didn’t know what a school board member was, I didn’t know what a city council or supervisor did…all that stuff. I also wasn’t really in tune with why voting mattered.”
Which is why Hernandez is as surprised as anyone by his career path in community leadership. “I never thought in my wildest dreams this was going to be something that I’d get an opportunity to do.” (He’s come full circle—in 2020 he was re-elected as Area 5 representative on the Sonoma County Board of Education and this year serves as board president.)
From 2019 to 2022, Hernandez managed his own event-consulting firm. Although his firm worked with nonprofits, he had never considered applying for a position at Los Cien. But while coordinating Los Cien’s annual Puente y Ganas Awards, he learned of the nonprofit’s search for an executive director and the responsibilities it would entail. “I was like—this a lot of the stuff I do as a consultant: community engagement, talking about community issues, coordinating events and things of that nature. Maybe I’ll give it a shot.”
Looking back, he recalls about being first offered the job: “I was like, ‘Oh man! This is so cool!
“I was absolutely honored and privileged to have this opportunity.”
Hernandez says that within the last decade much of his perspective has changed due to conversations he’s tuned into through Los Cien and he’s committed to elevating Latino voices and standing up for marginalized communities that have been historically disconnected from local government. He saw being selected to lead Los Cien as an opportunity that he wasn’t going to take for granted since his father was a founding member and chair of the organization. “My decision [to take the job] was purely based on my belief that the influence [Los Cien] can make can lead to positive outcomes.”
Widening the umbrella
As the executive director of Los Cien, Hernandez says he’s responsible for overseeing the organization’s budget and putting together an extensive list of events and programs throughout the year. By the end of 2023, Los Cien will have hosted nine community luncheons/conversations and five larger events. “This year has been about learning the Los Cien budget and kind of creating a culture. I was the second employee hired full time,” he says, noting program manager Monica Viña predated him by about a year.
Other tasks on his to-do list include stewarding board meetings, expanding membership and building up the nonprofit’s staff, which now numbers about 30. He says another priority is strategic planning and where to focus the organization’s energy on Los Cien’s role in the community moving forward. Historically, he says Los Cien has been known as a bridge-building organization that brings diverse communities together to engage in difficult conversations. Now, he’s ramping up outreach to community members and local leaders about professional development and leadership training for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People Of Color) residents, as well as Latinos, who are interested in joining nonprofit organizations or learning about what it takes to be on a city or county commission.
Though Los Cien is known for its community engagement, he wants to move the organization toward more traditional outreach—going out into neighborhoods and appearing at community events. He wants to take what the nonprofit has been doing informally all these years and professionalize it. “[It’s important to] maintain the public perception of Los Cien, but also be focused internally to develop systems and operations and things of that nature.”
While Los Cien as an organization is committed to such values as diversity, accountability, commitment to family, compassion, equality and creativity, Hernandez believes there are areas for the nonprofit to improve. One focus he’s had since starting has been on “embracing other ethnic and identity groups who’ve experienced similar oppression or marginalization from government and local communities” as Latinos. For instance, he says he’d like to have community conversations about lagging high school graduation rates among local Black, Latino and Native American males, or the impact the housing crisis has had on certain Asian-American ethnicities. He believes Los Cien can lead through a Latino lens, but also uplift voices of other communities of color, as well as LGBTQIA+ residents.
“I’m guilty of this, too,” says Hernandez. “Like when we talk about [the] Latino community, we’re forgetting about our Black brothers and sisters, who are also identified as Afro-Latinx.” That desire to focus on multi-racial unity led to last year’s State of Latino Community Address—the group’s biggest event, held annually at Sonoma State University—and its spotlight on building trust and advancing dialogue among all marginalized communities in the county.
“We kicked off this year with a conversation about anti-Blackness, and how racism and bigotry is not just a White-American person’s problem, but it’s Latinos, Latinx and Hispanic people’s problems as well, because we’re racist, too, within our own ethnic groups,” says Hernandez. “That’s a very important conversation to have.
“Los Cien has continued to elevate, focus and spotlight Latino issues, but it’s also doing its best to try and uplift other voices as well.”
The path ahead
One person familiar with Hernandez’s work is Los Cien’s board chair, Lisa Carreño, who’s also the president and CEO of United Way of the Wine Country in Santa Rosa. “Herman G. brings a new and fresh and energizing perspective to his leadership role simply by virtue of having a lot of lived experience—as an entrepreneur and small business owner, and as a public servant on the Sonoma County Office of Education Board of Trustees,” says Carreno, also noting his time volunteering for the Russian River Rotary
She also appreciates Hernandez from “a generational perspective,” pointing out he has “values of a much younger person and professional” than many of the Los Cien leaders of the original, founding group.
Los Cien, says Carreno, must both “look at [what] it has been for the past 14 years” while “looking [at what it expects] to become in the next decade.”
Los Cien has historically received a majority of its funding through luncheon and event sponsorships, says Hernandez. It was this year that the organization made a push to increase its membership revenue; its original membership of 92 has grown over the years to 313. But the positive growth in membership has had a ripple effect in other avenues—such as the costs to cater their events. The group has always put a priority on ensuring tickets to events are affordable, yet catering can be “extremely expensive,” says Hernandez. One solution, he points to, is to have local food trucks set up at the event allowing attendees to purchase their own, less-expensive lunch. “We get about 75 to 100 people that attend Los Cien programs or events for free,” says Hernandez. And it’s a way “to keep the cost down” for everybody.
Going forward, Hernandez expects Los Cien to continue making inroads into leadership development—governance training for Latinos in the form of workshops and classes. For instance, a first step in leadership development would be positioning Latinos for serving on a nonprofit board or a city commission. Then, after gaining that experience, consider running for a local elected position, such as a seat on a school board or city council.
He says that even before he was hired at Los Cien he’d hear from nonprofit leaders with open board positions or elected officials with vacant commission seats about their difficulties recruiting Latinos—which makes it evident to him that Los Cien needs to start some type of leadership incubation program that connects program participants to nonprofit leaders and their boards. As he sees it, Los Cien is about building bridges and relationships, and it would be mutually beneficial to local nonprofits, as well as to the BIPOC community, if potential leaders are well-equipped with expectations and resources on what is needed to be a good board or commission member.
While there’s no specific test Los Cien has to identify a quality leader, there’s a component to leadership where the more information, data and knowledge one has of their community, the better equipped they are to lead.
Carreno says Hernandez and his team have their work cut out for them over the next few years to catapult Los Cien to the next level. They’re in the early stages of a strategic-planning process, whose completion will mark a critical stage in the development of the organization.
“We have gone from being an idea of Herman J. [Hernandez] to early stages of organizational development,” she says. And now that Los Cien has grown so significantly over the last three years, they need to reassess “what the community needs from us and what we need to become in order to meet the community where it is.” The strategic planning process to map a course for the next five years will be key.
“That, frankly, is essential to every other decision that we make,” she says.
