Boys and Girls Club hires Santa Rosa community engagement director to lead youth services

Feb. 9—Magali Telles, former head of Sonoma County's largest Latino leadership group and leader of the city of Santa Rosa's community engagement efforts since 2020, has been hired as vice president of youth impact at the Boys and Girls Club of Sonoma-Marin.

Telles will oversee operations at the organization's new Roseland facility and youth programs inside Sonoma County Juvenile Hall.

She'll also continue outreach work in the community to help the organization better understand youth needs.

Telles, whose first day is Feb. 15, said she was "very excited" about the opportunity and would draw on her past experience to help her in her new role.

"Everything I've done has added so much to my understanding of how to get to the crux of what the community needs and not go on assumption," she said.

The move caps Telles' efforts over the last 2 1/2 years to improve relationships between Santa Rosa city government and residents and brings her full circle to where her local community work first started.

Her first full-time job out of college was with the Boys and Girls Club.

"We are very excited to have Magali join our team and we really see it as a coming home, starting her career at the Boys and Girls Club and now coming back to help us open this new club," said CEO Jennifer Weiss. "Through her work in Roseland already, so many community members and partners know her and trust her and we're excited to bring new friends to the club and bring her passion for making the community a better place."

Expanding youth services

Telles will be charged with opening the Roseland Club, the organization's new $17 million facility on Sebastopol Road, and expanding youth services in Roseland.

The Boys and Girls Club currently serves about 1,000 kids in the Roseland School District at clubs housed inside four schools, the organization's Chief Development Officer Michelle Heery said.

The new facility, which is slated to be completed in early spring, is expected to help serve about 250 students on any given day and an additional 1,000 students a year, Heery said.

The new Roseland Boys & Girls Club in Santa Rosa is nearing completionTuesday, December 20, 2022. (John Burgess/The Press Democrat)

The facility's operations will include about $4 million annually in before- and after-school programs and summer programs for young kids.

Heery said Telles was a natural fit for the job because of her past work in Roseland and "has a great energy" to match the excitement the new clubhouse is expected to generate.

"When we started to dream about the way we wanted to expand our work in Roseland ... we thought of who in the community would be the best possible person to launch this new clubhouse and Magali was the very first person that came to mind," Heery said.

Beyond work at the Roseland Club, Telles will oversee the organization's programs inside the juvenile detention center and the targeted re-entry program, known as REACH.

The Boys and Girls Club has provided services inside the detention center since 2011 and in 2013 expanded to add the REACH program, which seeks to reduce recidivism rates by working with those most at risk of ending back in the system after they're released to help them enroll in school, find employment and secure housing. It serves about 100 people a year.

Telles will also continue building on the partnerships she developed through her previous posts to expand services and resources available to youth and their families.

Telles said she is interested in working with social service organizations to expand access to mental health services for young people and help kids and their parents more effectively navigate education, health care and government.

She also wants to help young people become more civically engaged so that they themselves can better advocate for their needs.

"I want to bring them to the table," she said. "They already know what they need and nobody can say it better than they can."

Two decades of community commitment

Telles, who grew up in Fresno, said an opportunity to volunteer at a women's shelter in eighth grade sparked an early interest in volunteerism and community engagement.

That interest grew here in Sonoma County where she moved more than 20 years ago to attend Sonoma State University.

Through her work with various organizations over the years she sought to address what she saw as a lack of access and resources for underserved populations and also find ways to help mentor the next generation.

She was hired in 2005 at the Boys and Girls Club to work with about 40 kids at a housing site in Petaluma.

"I fell in love with the youth and the families and what we were building as a small group," she said.

She later returned to her alma mater where she worked as an outreach specialist and college readiness counselor.

A native of Michoacan, Mexico, Telles, 40, was the first member of her family to attend a four-year university and she saw firsthand the barriers first-generation college students can encounter when trying to navigate admissions and financial aid.

"We didn't have the understanding of how to access certain systems and social capital," she said.

So she decided to tackle that through programs like SSU's Latino Family Summit, an annual event she started that brings hundreds of families to the Rohnert Park campus for workshops on how to prepare for college.

In 2018 she was hired as Los Cien's first executive director to help carry out the previously all-volunteer organization's mission of building bridges between Sonoma County's growing Latino community and others.

She was hired by Santa Rosa in July 2020 as its new community engagement director as the city sought to address public calls for equity and racial justice. As part of that role, she oversaw implementation of the city's community empowerment plan, led resident engagement efforts and oversaw the city's Violence Prevention Partnership, a collaborative effort started 20 years ago and led by the city, civic organizations and schools to address violent crime in the community.

Telles said while she wasn't looking to leave that role, she couldn't pass up the opportunity to once again work directly with youth.

"Once I learned about the space and the possibilities and the needs in that community, I just couldn't not do it," she said.

She said her team in Santa Rosa has done a great job of making all residents feel included in the government process and she hopes community engagement efforts continue to be prioritized. She looks forward to continuing to work with the city in this new capacity, she said.

"We were making some really fanatics strides in terms of building trust and creating access and my hope is that continues," she said.

The community engagement division is currently being managed by Assistant City Manager Daryel Dunston to provide continuity following Telles' departure, city spokesperson Lon Peterson said.

Peterson said the division's community engagement coordinator is leading engagement work with help from the city's communications team and the violence prevention work is ongoing.

You can reach Staff Writer Paulina Pineda at 707-521-5268 or paulina.pineda@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @paulinapineda22.

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