In 1999, I hired Argelia to take a deep dive into murky waters. On behalf of a consortium of the largest businesses in the Washington, DC area, I was chairing a newly formed counseling and scholarship program to serve all the public school students in the city of Washington DC. It was to be called the DC College Access Program (DC-CAP).

The job would be difficult: the DC school system had been troubled for years and the symptoms of that trouble would affect what we were trying to do. For one thing, the leader—then called the superintendent, later the chancellor, seemed to change every couple of years. And second, the system had a near-perfect record of something between indifference and hostility, even to nonprofits that could clearly help their students.

As I watched her build the organization, I learned things about Argelia.

- She makes friends; she doesn’t make enemies (you have no idea how easy it was to make enemies in the DC school system of that day). To begin our operation, we had to get all 17 senior high school principals to invite us into their school, assess their college counseling operations and establish real working partnerships. We went 17 for 17. And by 2007, DC-CAP was operating in all 40 DC public and charter high schools.

- She is comfortable in new worlds: There was no program in the country like the one she was creating. The structure, the system and the details were all her doing. As a result of her innovation, the number of DC public and charter school students enrolling in college more than doubled. The number of college graduates tripled.

- She handles both strategy and detail. Nonprofits need fundraising. Argelia produced an American Idol-type competition among DC public and charter school students that lasted 14 years until it ran into the pandemic. She secured the Kennedy Center as the venue and iconic celebrity judges. The students selected were just the right ones. She got the right people to stage it. The student competitors wowed the audience and the city was reminded of the potential and power of investing in its youth.

- She knows in detail the complicated worlds of education, education finance, and the relationship of college and career. She’s an absolute authority on minority, underrepresented and first-generation students and what it takes to help them succeed long term.

As a consultant, Argelia will be easy to work with, a pleasure for your whole team, and highly productive, whatever results you are looking for. She knows education, she knows business, she knows diverse talent, she knows how to get results. I recommend her without qualification.