Continuing a long tradition of organizing among Pomona students and alumni, Jacob Merkle ’18 and Niles Brooks ’20 created Rhizome to equip the next generation of leaders.

The yearning to build a better world may be innate, but the skills to become an effective organizer often need to be learned.

Jacob Merkle ’18 believes in the potential of young people to create the world they want to live in: They just need structure, encouragement and clear paths to opportunity. To provide those things, he founded Rhizome, a grassroots nonprofit for emerging high school leaders to learn how to organize and create civic communities.

“So many young people, especially today, really genuinely want to take on high-impact work, want to make meaning with their time,” says Merkle.

An international relations and politics double major from Seattle, Merkle first became an organizer himself while at Pomona. He reveled in “the feeling when you’re shoulder to shoulder with folks that aren’t just talking about making the world a better place but are actually taking active steps toward making that happen.”

While Merkle says that the most meaningful parts of his time at Pomona were the conversations he had over meals at the dining hall, he also graduated with top accolades in both of his majors, winning the Fred Krinsky Prize in Comparative Politics and the John A. Vieg Prize in International Relations.

Professor of Politics Heather Williams says of Merkle, “He is one of those ‘immortals,’ or students whose presence, thought and writing rise above their peers. He’s one of the most likely politics alumni to become a major thought leader and public intellectual.”

After graduating, Merkle worked for Michelle Obama’s organization When We All Vote, where he helped register 38,000 students to vote. While doing that work, he realized the untapped potential of high school and college students. He enrolled at Cambridge University and earned a master’s degree in sociology, with his dissertation focused on the language used by history’s most persuasive nonviolent movements to motivate people into action.

“This research offered a personal, practical blueprint for how to organize sustainably over the course of my lifetime,” Merkle says.

Shortly after that, in 2021, he founded Rhizome (werhize.org). The impetus was “to be a part of building something that was authentically student-led, that was sustainable, that was collectively owned.”

He began calling people he had worked with in prior organizing efforts and eventually had 90 co-founders. These student organizers continue to vote to shape the goals, vision and work environment of Rhizome.

One of the people Merkle tapped was Niles Brooks ’20. Brooks, an international relations major from Memphis, Tennessee, headed Building Leaders on Campus (BLOC) at Pomona as well as Young Men’s Circle, a community outreach program. The two knew each other through playing together on the Pomona-Pitzer men’s soccer team. Merkle saw Brooks serving as a “spiritual center” for Rhizome, calling him “one of the most morally wonderful people” he has met.

Others at Pomona apparently agreed. Brooks won the Ted Gleason Award, given annually to the student who made a warm-hearted contribution to the community life of the College through traits such as sympathy, friendliness, good cheer, generosity and, particularly, perseverance and courage.

Brooks’ nonprofit work is partly inspired by his grandparents. “I learned from a young age what it meant to not have basic civil liberties in this country. My grandparents were folks who grew up in Jim Crow segregation,” he says. “Anytime I can leverage my experiences to help others, I will do that.”

Brooks believes in the work of Rhizome because “the younger we become civically engaged, the more likely we’ll treat civic engagement as a lifelong leadership activity.”

Through the support of Merkle, Brooks and other mentors, more than 600 students in organizing fellowships at 125 high schools have taken on campaigns such as advocating for safety policies in their cities, feminine hygiene products in their school bathrooms or spreading information about democracy vouchers—a recently developed finance method that allows voters to select recipients of public funding for political campaigns. Additionally, fellows helped more than 7,000 peers register to vote last year, and Merkle hopes to build on that number this year.

“Whatever it is that fellows care most about, we want to provide support for them to take action around those ideas,” says Merkle.

Merkle repeatedly strikes a spiritual tone as he speaks about his work. He and Brooks trained with the James Lawson Institute, a program for organizing movements and nonviolent action. (The Rev. Lawson, a contemporary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and a leading architect of the civil rights movement, spoke at Pomona along with Myrlie Evers-Williams ’68 in the inaugural Payton Distinguished Lectureship in 2018.)

“I think organizing is at some level always an act of faith,” Merkle says. “A belief in things unseen.”

This faith could be applied to Merkle’s long-term vision for Rhizome as well. In it for the long haul, he says, he hopes to make local chapters of the organizing fellowship accessible to students in every community across the country someday.

“We are in the nascent stages of building something that we think is going to get really big and beautiful,” says Merkle.

As a law student at UC Irvine, Viridiana Chabolla ’13 became a plaintiff in the case that preserved DACA. Now she gives a voice to immigrants by advocating for others.

There are not a lot of big wins for Viridiana Chabolla ’13 in her line of work. It’s not for a lack of trying, or a lack of sweat and tears. Her commitment has been tested over the years but she remains determined. Chabolla is an attorney working in immigration law. The landscape is grim, she says. It can be heartbreaking. Demoralizing. She’s not just an attorney. She is an immigrant, too, and for most of her life she was undocumented.

In February, the Los Angeles Times wrote a story about one of her recent clients. Leonel Contreras, a U.S. Army veteran, was a legal permanent resident before being deported to Mexico after serving time for a nonviolent crime. Contreras had grown up in the U.S., but after his deportation he worked and lived in Tijuana for at least a decade before the Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles took his case and Chabolla helped him return to his family members in California. He became a U.S. citizen earlier this year.

“It’s really nice to wave an American flag at a naturalization ceremony,” says Chabolla, who began working at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) in October 2021. “Immigration law is so harsh and when it’s not harsh, it’s just not helpful. It’s hard to have a win. When you have those moments, you have to grab on and make them last.”

Chabolla was born in Guanajuato, Mexico. Her mother came to the U.S. to escape a bad relationship and start a new life. A 2-year-old Chabolla and the rest of her mother’s family joined her soon after. Chabolla grew up with her grandparents, aunts and cousins all living close to each other in East Los Angeles. “I’d remember seeing my mom and aunts getting ready for work at ridiculous hours of the day,” she says of the early-morning hubbub. “I remember always being surrounded by people and conversations. There were a lot of disagreements but a lot of love.”

When she was 11, Chabolla met a group of lawyers who worked in East L.A. Although she didn’t know what exactly they did, she recalls thinking that they seemed to hold a lot of power. They seemed to have some kind of authority to help her and others like her—people who were not born in the U.S.

It was during Chabolla’s junior year at Pomona that the Obama administration established an immigration policy that changed her life. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) allowed certain immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and also become eligible for a work permit.

For the first time, Chabolla was able to have a job on campus. She saved her first pay stub. It wasn’t much in terms of money, but it was significant for Chabolla.

With DACA, Chabolla’s future seemed a bit brighter. She could now apply for jobs after graduation. Her first work after Pomona was as an organizer with the pro bono legal services nonprofit Public Counsel, a choice that set her on a course for a win of historic proportions.

The Trump administration’s 2017 decision to rescind DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) set off protests in multiple cities.

For four years, Chabolla took down the stories of plaintiffs for cases being handled by Public Counsel. As time passed, she began to feel more empowered to share her immigration status with her director, Mark Rosenbaum, even as the national political landscape was transitioning from an Obama presidency to a Trump one.

“When Trump was elected, I broke down,” she says. She remembers Rosenbaum calling her to tell her she didn’t have to go to work the next day: “Go be with your family, go through your emotions,” he told her.

“We didn’t know what Trump would do first. We just hit the ground running,” says Chabolla, who worked on the defense case for Daniel Ramirez Medina, the first person to have his DACA permit taken away. “With everything going on, we focused on putting out fires. Trump wasn’t taking out DACA in one go just yet. He was creating all of this panic everywhere first.”

Her time at Public Counsel rekindled Chabolla’s original interest in law.

“I kept thinking of the best way I could help others. I loved the idea of gaining new knowledge, and a degree in law would allow me to have a sense of power,” she says. The attorneys at Public Counsel, like her boss Rosenbaum, not only practiced law and led big cases but they also wrote articles and taught university-level courses.

In September of 2017, the Trump administration announced it was officially rescinding DACA. Chabolla had just started at the UC Irvine School of Law. Her initial response was to focus on school and wait.

Then Chabolla got a call from Rosenbaum. “He called me to be a plaintiff in a case against the United States. I felt terrified.”

Chabolla phoned her mother and her family. “If I shared my story, I would have to share their story,” she says. She also was married by then and discussed the possible ramifications with her husband.

Her family was supportive. Chabolla felt compelled to help.

The Public Counsel lawsuit led by Rosenbaum was filed as Garcia v. United States. As it made its way through the higher courts, it was merged with four other cases and ultimately became known as Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California by the time it reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

As a plaintiff in the case, Chabolla shared her story with a lawyer for a written declaration. While she never testified before any judges, she did have to share her immigration story multiple times as the case garnered national media attention.

On June 18, 2020, the Supreme Court delivered its 5-4 decision blocking the Trump administration’s elimination of DACA. Chabolla was in Washington for the hearing. “A few of us got to go inside,” she recalls. “Some DACA students were there, too. And it was really powerful. These justices were hearing arguments on this huge case…but I know maybe for them all cases they hear are huge. But we occupied half the room and that was really powerful and really unusual.”

Chabolla took notes during the hearing. “I remember writing down something that Justice [Sonia] Sotomayor said: ‘This is not about the law; this is about our choice to destroy lives.’

“So much of what Trump did was done without following administrative law,” explains Chabolla about how they “won” this case. “Trump didn’t follow procedure,” she says. “If they had taken their time and done it right, it would have passed. But I remember taking the win.”

Chabolla, who had just recently become a U.S. resident through marriage, remembers feeling relief for the DACA community.

“The DACA victory in the Supreme Court is a testament to the vision, commitment and tireless efforts of many, and Viri’s name would surely be at the top of that list,” says Rosenbaum. “I had the privilege of working with Viri at Public Counsel, first as an organizer…and then to come forward as a plaintiff in Garcia to inspire others to do the same and make the case that our nation needs DACA recipients to build a kinder and more inclusive community for all of us.”

Upon returning home, Chabolla once again focused on school—it was her second-to-last semester at UC Irvine. She spent a year as a graduate legal assistant with the Office of the Attorney General for the California Department of Justice. It was a tough gig for a newly graduated lawyer. After one year, she left for her current job as a staff attorney at ImmDef, a legal services nonprofit with a post-conviction unit that drew her interest. “They take on clients who have criminal convictions like possession of marijuana from 40 years ago with deportation orders—deportation is not a fair punishment for everyone.

Viridiana Chabolla ’13, who was brought to the U.S. from Mexico at 2 years old, on the day she became a U.S. citizen in 2021.

“Many of our clients have been living here as legal permanent residents for more than 20 years. Most find out they’re getting deported just when they’re going to be released,” she says. “The statistics show that immigrants commit fewer crimes than the general population and our clients have already served their time—in jail, or prison, they’ve paid their dues and they’ve even paid their fines. Adding deportation is a way of saying ‘I don’t like that you’re an immigrant.’ It’s extra punishment.”

The work is tough. “My supervisor has shared that sometimes we have to redefine what a win is,” says Chabolla. “It makes up partially for the times when we have a clinic and all these people show up thinking they can apply for residency when they actually can’t.”

She says that the immigrants she talks to are so full of hope. They believe that an attorney—like herself—can do it all. “Every situation is different. No lawyer has a miracle cure.

“It’s heartbreaking to know how many people are becoming elders who don’t have a nest egg, who paid taxes into the system but they can’t access Social Security, can’t access Medicare,” Chabolla adds. “It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about in the past two years: How can I help aside from placing my hopes in a Congress that is more concerned about building borders than dealing with these issues?”

In 2021, Chabolla became a U.S. citizen. The day was bittersweet and laden with guilt. “It was one of those moments where I felt I was further abandoning my undocumented community, but I know that’s not true,” she says. Although her mother recently became a U.S. resident, some of her family remains undocumented.

Chabolla says she’s been able to find some balance as an ally who was once directly impacted by immigration policies. “I’m trying to find a place where I can remain hopeful in my job and be a zealous lawyer and advocate.”

It’s unusual for a U.S. Embassy to have even a single Sagehen, but for three years in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, the entire Cultural Section was schooled in the arts of 47. 

Erik Black ’95 and Doug Morrow ’01, both career diplomats, arrived together in the summer of 2018. Black, the new cultural affairs officer, had studied in Russia and served two years at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv following Ukraine’s 2004-05 Orange Revolution. He arrived in Prague fresh from six years at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Morrow, his new deputy, had previously lived in Moscow and worked for two years at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv shortly before Ukraine overthrew pro-Russia president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.

This is their perspective on the work of diplomacy.

 The first time either of us realized we had both gone to Pomona was before we even arrived in the Czech Republic. Doug was still in Iraq and had just received his onward assignment to Prague. “Naturally, I cyberstalked my future boss—then in Beijing—and was both shocked and delighted to learn he was a fellow Sagehen,” he recalls. “Fortunately, I was able to travel a few months later on vacation to China, where we met up for lunch, and I was gratified to discover how much I enjoyed Erik as a person.”

Diplomats don’t have to be serious all the time. Doug Morrow ’01 imitates the bird depicted on the building behind him.

Later, as Russian speakers, we were grouped together in our 10-month Czech language class in Northern Virginia, where we had even more of an opportunity to get to know one another. We had a lot more in common than Claremont; we both had spent time in Russia and Ukraine before the Russian invasion.

“Ukraine was my first assignment in the Foreign Service,” Erik says. “I have fond memories of Kyiv and the wonderful Ukrainian people I was privileged to know. Watching the news each day about the unnecessary destruction in places where I lived, worked, or visited breaks my heart.”

Doug has even closer ties.

“It’s been horrifying to see what’s happening to my friends and colleagues in Ukraine,” he says. “Even though I left in 2013, I’ve been back to visit almost every year since, and have remained close friends with the Ukrainian staff at the embassy. They’ve all had to flee Kyiv, some to Western Ukraine, others to various countries in Europe.”

Erik Black, right, during an embassy function while serving as the U.S. cultural affairs officer in the Czech Republic.

What we didn’t realize when we arrived in the Czech Republic—a member of NATO since 1999 and of the European Union since 2004, but once part of the Warsaw Pact—was that most of our time would be spent blunting the impact of Russian and Chinese propaganda and disinformation campaigns. Erik was well attuned to China’s international influence efforts through its Belt and Road Initiative and network of Confucius Centers from his experience in Beijing. Doug was versed in Russian methods from his time in Moscow. 

“I thought coming to the heart of Europe would mean a break from China issues after my back-to-back tours in Beijing,” Erik says.

Doug had similar expectations.

“Honestly, I thought this was going to be sort of a break after heading the public affairs section in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region during the middle of the ISIS war, but it was anything but,” he says.

Leading a team of three Czech nationals that included some of the most talented and experienced staff at the embassy, Erik was charged with engaging Czech opinion leaders in a variety of fields: the arts, journalism, higher education, business and civil society.

“Our goal was to better explain American government and society and help strengthen our shared democratic values and ideals among Czechs who have significant influence,” he says. 

Doug’s team of four Czechs focused on the nation’s young people ages 14-30, the first generation of voters and workers in that country to have grown up without any memory of authoritarianism. 

“The concern was that this lack of direct experience might weaken their resolve to maintain their 32-year-old democracy,” he says. “Before COVID, we started making the rounds to high schools and universities to engage students in discussions on why democracy matters. Polling bore out our concerns: Among the 38 countries that are members of the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development], young Czech adults report by far the lowest interest in politics.”

That might have been part of the reason the Czech Republic’s president, who regularly praised authoritarian Russia and China, was re-elected with a comfortable majority in 2018. 

We both agreed it was important to have a conversation with Czechs about why our shared democratic values still mattered.

The China Problem

At the time, China had already begun a major influence campaign in the Czech Republic. The Czech president had declared his hope it would become an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for Chinese investment into the European Union. 

A series of state visits, the opening of new Czech-Chinese institutes and Confucius Centers, and attempts to lure Czech students to study in China all created concern in the embassy about long-term Czech commitments to our shared democratic values, as did increasingly favorable poll numbers for China. In response, the cultural team crafted a multi-year campaign to highlight Chinese human rights abuses and the dangers of increasing reliance on Chinese information technology.

The Chinese government did itself no favors. When the progressive mayor of Prague spoke out in favor of Taiwan and Tibet in 2019, the Chinese government retaliated by canceling planned cultural tours by any musical groups that happened to have “Prague” in their name. (In the Czech Republic, high art and classical music are sacrosanct: Don’t Mess with Dvorak.) 

Erik Black ’95, holding instrument at left, organized a concert by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra at the ambassador’s official residence, upper right, to counter tour cancellations by the Chinese related to the Prague mayor’s support for Taiwan and Tibet.

Erik’s team capitalized by inviting one orchestra blocked by China to perform at the Petschek Villa, the ambassador’s official residence—which happens to be across the street from the Chinese Embassy. To broaden the impact, we arranged for the concert to be broadcast live on national radio. One Czech journalist described the concert as “a totally badass move by the U.S. Embassy.” Combined with other programs, including expert speakers and a nationally touring public photo exhibition documenting abuses against the Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang and remembrances of the Tiananmen Square massacre, our teams succeeded in getting Czechs across the country talking about the values gap with China and questioning how close they really wanted to be.

The Russia Problem 

Meanwhile, publicly available polling data showed that the far east of the Czech Republic had the highest levels of support for political parties on the extreme left and right wings, groups whose commitment to democratic ideals was questionable.

Ostrava, the largest city in the east, is a rust-belt metropolis suffering from relatively high unemployment and ethnic tension. A flashy Russian Consulate sits on the high street, and a giant Russian tank—a World War II memorial—holds prominent ground downtown on the river. Support for the Communist party was higher there than in any other part of the country. 

Situated three hours from the embassy, Ostrava’s residents had previously been difficult to reach, so Doug’s team launched a new American cultural center there as a platform for American speakers, media and other engagement. We found willing partners in the city and region’s leadership, who—with distinct memories of life under a Communist autocracy—understood the risks of ongoing economic stagnation and cultural isolation.

Ambassador Stephen King meets with Embassy Youth Council members at the new U.S. cultural center in Ostrava.

We recruited high school students from the region and across the country to spend a year in the United States with host families so that they could effectively serve as informal ambassadors upon their return, explaining U.S. politics, society and culture in towns and cities unlikely to see a real-life diplomat. In addition, we established a partnership with the local (and impressive) children’s science museum to develop a critical-thinking exhibit to help local children better challenge Russian state disinformation campaigns. 

To address the Russia problem with another important audience, Erik’s team worked with Czech alumni of U.S. government exchange programs in 2019 to organize a two-day regional workshop titled “Propaganda and Its Tools in the Post-Soviet Bloc: How to Fight It.” Experts from seven Central and Eastern European countries gathered with fellow European alumni of U.S. government programs in Prague to discuss Russian propaganda, disinformation campaigns and cyber operations, as well as best practices and successful strategies to counter them. The conference attendees, many of whom are in positions of influence within their respective countries, recommitted themselves to working collectively to counter Russian disinformation.

Just as it did with everything else, the COVID-19 pandemic created challenges to traditional public diplomacy efforts, which typically traffic in face-to-face engagement. We had to adapt our programs, turning to Zoom and other tools to reach virtual audiences. When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited the Czech Republic during a COVID lull in August 2020—the first high-level official U.S. visit in eight years—we helped coordinate media coverage and engagements with the traveling U.S. press, as well as with the Czech and international media reporting on the trip. 

Secretary Pompeo’s visit included a public speech on NATO and European security under growing Russian threats at the “Thank You, America!” monument in Pilsen, which commemorates the U.S. soldiers who liberated Western Bohemia from the Nazis. He also made a major policy speech in the historic Czech Senate chambers calling for greater Western unity in countering growing Chinese influence in Central and Eastern Europe. It was a proud moment for us at the Czech Senate when Secretary Pompeo referenced our effective cultural work in the Czech Republic to influence public attitudes towards China.

By the summer of 2021, our productive three-year Prague assignments—a typical stint in the U.S. Foreign Service—were over. Erik went on to serve a one-year tour as the Cultural Affairs Officer in Kabul, Afghanistan, which included surviving the August evacuation of the U.S. Embassy as Kabul fell.

“I was in Kabul when Taliban forces entered the capital and I evacuated on the last available commercial flight out, escorted by Black Hawk helicopters. The final apocalyptic hours in Afghanistan are seared in my memory,” Erik says. “To save Afghan lives, we rushed boxes of program files to large burning dumpsters behind the U.S. Embassy and destroyed the name placards on every Afghan staff cubicle.” 

Evacuated first to Washington, and later to Doha, Qatar, Erik helped with Afghan staff evacuation and U.S. resettlement efforts, registered thousands of Afghan refugees into the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, convinced Washington to provide funding to cover 120 new graduate scholarships for Afghan female students, and built a new platform in Doha for conducting public diplomacy in Afghanistan. He returns to Washington this summer to work on the China desk for two years as an embedded public diplomacy adviser. 

 Doug returned to the U.S. for a one-year master’s program in War, Diplomacy, and Society at Chapman University, not too far down the road from Pomona, after which he’ll be returning to Iraqi Kurdistan for a two-year stint. We became close friends during our three years in Prague, and we were grateful for the opportunity to serve our country together in such a beautiful and historic city, on such pivotal issues. On our last day together last summer, we ascended the hillside behind the U.S. Embassy with our Czech staff for pictures at the Glorietta pavilion that overlooks the Vltava River and Prague’s famous Charles Bridge and stands across from Prague Castle. We will miss our amazing team and this beautiful place. 

Like most alumni, we know the words on the College Gates almost by heart. We feel gratitude that Pomona opened our minds to new possibilities and put us on the path to diplomatic careers in the U.S. Foreign Service, where we continue to “bear our added riches” for people not only in the U.S., but around the world. 

It’s around lunchtime on a weekday when two friends meet up in the Smith Campus Center’s courtyard. A dozen or more outdoor tables are buzzing with Pomona College students as they chat, eat and work under umbrellas protecting them from the high-noon sun. In the middle of the courtyard, recycled water endlessly cascades from a spout in the iconic Smith Campus Center fountain. For Anaa Jibicho ’23, the fountain is a reminder of his mission.

At a small table, Jibicho sits with his best friend and business partner Brian Bishop ’22 as they await the lunch they’ve ordered from the Coop. Together with a third partner, Lamah Bility, they run Didomi—a social enterprise named for the ancient Greek word for giving and founded on the principle of helping the nearly a billion people around the world who don’t have access to clean, safe water near their homes. They do this by donating a portion of the profits from sales of their fashionable, reusable water bottles to WaterIsLife, a nonprofit that provides filtration systems, pumps and drilling to help people access clean and safe water. The ventures also work to spread awareness of the crisis across the world.

“Water here is an aesthetic,” Jibicho says as he points to the fountain. “To have a basic necessity so readily available, we don’t think twice about it.”

REFUGEE ORIGINS

Anaa Jibicho ’23, left; Jibicho and Brian Bishop ’22 on the slopes, right; Jibicho and Bishop canoeing below.

Jibicho, an economics major, started Didomi in 2019 with Bility in Minnesota, where they had separately arrived as refugees from Africa at ages 7 and 11. As a young child in Ethiopia, Jibicho suffered the ill effects of drinking unsafe water. He and his family, members of the persecuted Oromo people, were forced to drink the only available water–which was not just unsafe but lethal. Before Jibicho’s birth, his mother had already suffered the unthinkable: Two of her children had fallen ill and died after ingesting unsafe water. When 2-year-old Jibicho became sick as well, she was determined not to lose another son. They fled to Kenya, and as refugees, she secured medical care that saved her youngest child’s life.

During his Orientation Adventure as a first-year student, Jibicho opened up and told his story to others in the group. Bishop, a sophomore leader on the trip who grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was staggered. “The numbers also blew me away,” says the math and media studies major. As Jibicho explains: “Nearly a billion people lack access to safe water, and unsafe water kills more people than war.”

The two students connected further as the year went on, but it was another outdoor experience that cemented their burgeoning friendship. An avid outdoorsman, Bishop invited Jibicho to the annual Ski-Beach Day, traditionally held in the spring semester. At a cost of $5 dollars per person, the trip takes a busload of 100 Pomona students to Mountain High resort in nearby Wrightwood for an early day of skiing followed by a same-day drive to the Pacific Ocean for an afternoon of fun in the sand. The trip always sells out. To secure a spot, students begin lining up early in the morning at the Associated Students of Pomona College office in a line that stretches around the second floor of the Smith Campus Center. Luckily for Bishop and Jibicho, they secured ticket numbers 98 and 99.

Jibicho and Brian Bishop ’22 on the slopes

Bishop, a member of the five-college ski and snowboard team that competes nationally, taught Jibicho to ski. He says it took a lot of convincing to drag Jibicho to the slopes. But now, skiing is one of Jibicho’s joys.

Conventional wisdom says that friendship and business don’t mix. Bishop says that opportunities like Pomona’s Orientation Adventure and Ski-Beach Day were instrumental in building a strong and holistic relationship between the two of them. “If you have those types of relationships, you’re more able to work together,” he says.

During spring break in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning, Jibicho saw an opportunity to grow Didomi’s potential. Staying with Bishop in New Mexico for the week, Jibicho pitched him an idea: Join Didomi and be a part of something bigger than both of them. Bishop had been looking into summer internships where he could use his media studies and creative skills and learn from experts.

It took a lot of persuasion, says Jibicho, to steer his friend away from a traditional internship and to take a leap of faith with Didomi instead: “I pitched him to create his own opportunity at Didomi and to learn by doing.”

Today, Bishop laughs remembering how much his friend had to do to get him to say yes—probably almost as much as he had to do to convince Jibicho to join him on those early ski trips.

SEEKING CHANGE

By the summer of 2020, Bishop had moved in with Jibicho and Bility in their hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, to develop brand guidelines for the reusable water bottle company.

Brian Bishop ’22

Bishop’s arrival in the Twin Cities coincided with the George Floyd protests rocking the Minneapolis area. Floyd’s death under the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin was captured on camera, sparking public outrage and unrest across the U.S.

Before even going to their apartment, Jibicho, Bility and Bishop attended the protests, with Bishop’s luggage still in the trunk. The energy on the streets inspired the three young Black men, and before long they took turns on the microphone sharing about their own experiences.

The energy of that historic summer continued to fuel the trio as they drew out Didomi’s vision, mission statement and brand guidelines. They got down to the finer details, including approved fonts, color schemes and what types of brands and companies they wanted to work with.

“Be the drop that makes ripples throughout the world.”

Refined that summer, this quote graces Didomi’s stainless steel bottles. Their logo is a drop of water that flows into two fingers drawn in a symbol meant to represent hope. Each bottle retails for $28, and half of the profits from a single bottle provides 10 years of access to safe water to one person in need in Africa.

Anaa Jibicho ’23, co-founder Lamah Bility and Brian Bishop ’22, right.

Bishop took a semester off during the 2020-2021 school year, which was marked by remote classes and uncertainty caused by COVID-19. Back home in New Mexico, he continued working on Didomi while auditing a social entrepreneurship course at Claremont McKenna College. Jibicho was enrolled in the same class, and both came out of it with tangible skills they would immediately put to the test.

Their hard work has led to large-scale partnerships with several institutions, including the University of New Mexico, Boys & Girls Clubs of America and the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. In Claremont, they have partnered with the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity (known as the Hive) and the Pomona College Office of Advancement.

The latest partnership they secured in January is with George Washington University. Jibicho says they beat out larger reusable water bottle companies for the contract to supply the university with nearly 30,000 Didomi bottles that will be given to the students, faculty and staff to help nudge the community away from single-use plastic bottles. The partnership will allow Didomi to provide water access to almost 30,000 people in Ghana, Guinea and Uganda for the next decade.

Being an entrepreneur, says Jibicho, has made his coursework at Pomona seem easier. “I’m using my education as a means to make tangible change for people around the world. I’ve been pushed to follow my passion here and use my education for good.”

Last summer, Didomi provided drinking water and reusable bottles for New Mexico’s first Juneteenth festival, helping spread awareness of the water crisis. During the three-day event, Didomi partnered with the arts production company Meow Wolf and the New Mexico United soccer team to give attendees custom-made water bottles, helping make an impact on the water crisis in Africa and reduce plastic waste in America.

To date, Jibicho and Bishop say, Didomi has helped 50,000 people in Africa. The future is full of opportunity for the young entrepreneurs, who have no plans to stop. Jibicho has one more year at Pomona. Bishop, a senior who took a semester off during the pandemic, is graduating at the end of 2022 and plans to focus on Didomi’s social media presence and the stories of the company’s impact that will inspire people. Bility, who already graduated from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, is boots-on-the-ground in West Africa, managing Didomi’s impact firsthand. Their hope is to see that one day everyone in the world will have access to all the clean, safe water they need.

“Lots of people have invested in our mission but no one is more invested than us,” Jibicho says. “We are committed to the work.” 

It’s midday at the Colorado Rockies’ Coors Field, still hours before first pitch. A couple of groundskeepers are busy mowing the grass with practiced precision, and another is spraying the infield dirt with a fine mist before the evening’s game.

High above the field, Linda Alvarado ’73 and Emily Glass ’15 sit in a quiet stadium lounge that soon will be buzzing with fans. They have little and yet worlds in common.

Alvarado is a self-made construction mogul with a net worth Forbes estimates at $230 million. The founder, president and CEO of Alvarado Construction, a large commercial general contractor, she became the first Latino owner in Major League Baseball history—and a woman who didn’t inherit her stake at that—as part of the ownership group that won an expansion bid for a new National League team in 1991 and brought the Colorado Rockies to Denver in 1993.

Glass is a new employee, only months on the job, digging her fingernails deeper into a career in baseball after being hired as the Rockies’ first female scout last November. Like Alvarado, she has gotten where she is with intelligence, a clever knack for finding her way around obstacles and a sense of humor that has served both women well in male-dominated fields. Besides the Rockies and a love for baseball, they have one other thing in common: Pomona College.

“What dorm did you live in?” Glass asks.

“I think I lived in Mudd,” Alvarado says, reaching back over the years.

“I lived in Mudd too!” Glass says.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Mudd 2 back. Did you go up the stairs?”

“I think so.”

“Mudd 2! Let’s go!” Glass says as they exchange one of the fist bumps that punctuate their conversation.

Though Alvarado learned about Glass’s baseball background during the scouting search and from former Rockies manager Clint Hurdle before she was hired, the pair didn’t discover their Pomona connection until well after Glass had started working for Marc Gustafson, the Rockies’ senior director of scouting operations, and been featured in the Denver Post.

Rockies co-owner Linda Alvarado ’73, left,
and scout Emily Glass ’15 in the stands at Coors Field.

Glass isn’t the only woman working as a scout for a major league team, and the so-called glass ceiling in baseball’s front offices already has been broken by Miami Marlins General Manager Kim Ng, who became MLB’s first female GM in 2020. But Glass, who serves as the Rockies’ scouting operations administrator in addition to scouring Colorado and beyond for amateur talent, is still part of the early wave of women in baseball. She’s someone with a “very bright future” as Gustafson told the Post after Glass emerged as one of the standouts from the MLB Diversity Pipeline Scout Development Program in Arizona last fall.

Alvarado and Glass followed very different paths to Pomona and had very different experiences.

Growing up in New Mexico, Alvarado shared a two-room adobe home with her parents and five brothers. “Not two bedrooms,” she says. “Two rooms.” The captain of her high school softball team, she turned down an opportunity to play college ball in the Midwest to attend Pomona on an academic scholarship.

Glass grew up in Northern California in what she describes as a University of California family. Her parents and brother earned degrees at various UCs, and her parents met in Berkeley. She played softball for two years at Pomona before quitting to play hardball with the guys in a beer league.

“A beer league? How come they didn’t have that when I was there?” Alvarado says. “My era was free love, you know. Burn your bras, and I was there when they first had Earth Day.”

MLB’s First Latino Owner

Alvarado’s girlhood was steeped in sports. “My parents didn’t embrace conventional thinking, particularly for Hispanic families, to let this girl be out there playing baseball with the boys, getting dirty, getting punched,” says Alvarado, born Linda Martinez. Her father was a catcher in summer baseball leagues, so she played catcher like him. “He would let me go clean the plate between innings—which is still the only plate I know how to clean,” she says with characteristic wit.

Throw in the fact that Alvarado’s first date with her future husband, Robert Alvarado, was at Dodger Stadium, and it’s clear that bringing an MLB team to Denver was more than an investment decision, though it has been a good one for Alvarado, the only woman in the ownership group that acquired the team for a $95 million expansion fee and startup costs. Today, Forbes values the Rockies at $1.385 billion, with majority owners Dick and Charlie Monfort helming a current group of four limited partners, including Alvarado.

Her involvement began with a phone call from then-Gov. Roy Romer in the early 1990s, asking her to meet him for breakfast at the Brown Palace, Denver’s iconic downtown hotel. “He didn’t call my husband,” Alvarado makes it clear, even though Robert is her partner in Palo Alto, Inc., a separate empire that operates more than 250 YUM! Brands franchise restaurants, many of them Taco Bells.

“I thought Gov. Romer was going to ask me for a political contribution,” she says. Instead he was asking her, as an entrepreneur, to consider joining a group of men working to put together a viable bid for a new MLB team. “There was no major league team between Kansas City and Los Angeles,” she says. “Colorado had been trying to get a team for years and years and years.”

Getting Alvarado on board strengthened the bid with her business experience, active involvement in civic and community leadership, and because Bill White, the National League president at the time, and MLB had emphasized diversity in ownership as an important factor. Besides writing a big check, the effort required determination and persistence, two qualities Alvarado has in abundance, and a willingness to take a big risk.

“It’s not like when you put a deposit down on a car, you don’t get the car, you get your money back,” she says. “Putting together a proposal like this is very challenging and costly. A lot of the questions they’re going to have before you even get considered for the short list: Are you committed? Are you aligned with the City? Are you going to be able to deliver success on the field and fill the stands, or is this an investment so you can be on the front page?”

A critical selection requirement was building a major league stadium, and the ownership group campaigned hard to pass a six-county sales tax referendum to fund construction of a new stadium. As the classic brick facade of Coors Field rose above a poor and dilapidated downtown warehouse district, it transformed that part of the city. Restaurants, retail, grocery stores, bars and other businesses moved in, rehabilitating vacant old buildings. New condominium towers rose along with high-rise offices, creating new jobs. Alvarado, walking around the stadium’s upper deck, points to a skyline still crowded with construction cranes today. “For many decades, this had been an abandoned area in Denver,” she says. “There was really nothing. Maybe just a few prairie dogs and some people who were homeless. Picking this site really has had a huge economic impact for the city.”

The Rockies were an immediate hit when they made their debut in 1993, drawing more than 80,000 in their first home game at the Denver Broncos’ old Mile High Stadium, playing on a converted football field that accommodated baseball by using a mechanical system to temporarily move a massive section of the stands. The team set an MLB attendance record by drawing nearly 4½ million fans its first season. Coors Field opened two years later in 1995, and with a group of Rockies sluggers known as the Blake Street Bombers for the stadium’s location at 20^th and Blake streets, the club made the playoffs in only its third season. The Rockies have hosted the MLB All-Star Game twice, and in 2007, they  reached the World Series against the Boston Red Sox but didn’t win.

‘Girls Do Food Service’

Alvarado’s success in whatever field she chose might have been inevitable. But her gravitation toward construction began with helping her father pour a concrete sidewalk at their little adobe, and accelerated at Pomona. Coming from New Mexico, “I was a little challenged, because I didn’t know what broccoli was, or brussels sprouts. I grew up with beans, rice and chiles,” Alvarado says. “But Pomona was great. Really game-changing in widening my knowledge and perspectives in economics, data analytics, risk-taking, strategic planning and motivation. The culture also held you accountable for participation in your classes, learning experiences, getting better grades, and not only being productive but also being proactive and collaborative with others in utilizing this knowledge to make a difference.”

Her parents, she says, were living week to week, so Alvarado sought a student job on campus. “You could do food service, library or groundskeeping,” she says. “I don’t know how to cook, so I applied for groundskeeper and went to go find the supervisor. He said, ‘What are you doing here? Don’t you understand? Girls do food service. Boys do groundskeeper.’”

She soon returned and told him, “‘I didn’t see on the posting it was only for boys.’ He said, ‘You can’t wear those shoes. You’re going to have to wear Levi’s to work. You’re going to be doing all this heavy lifting. You’re going to be in the sun and working with all these men!’

“I thought to myself, I don’t have to wear these painful women’s shoes. I can wear Levi’s to work, I don’t have to go to the gym, and I can get a tan. And I don’t pay you, you pay me to work with all these single guys? I was hired but I think he thought I would quit or whatever. In reality, I was more comfortable in that kind of environment.”

When a single parent in her family passed away leaving five kids with no resources while Alvarado was at Pomona, “I made a very difficult decision that I had to find a full-time job to provide some desperately needed financial support for these children,” she says.

Alvarado’s coworkers told her about other landscaping and commercial construction projects, and in 1972 she left Pomona to put her economics studies to practical purposes, working in commercial real estate development on financial planning, staging and procurement, and then on the construction side to the project completion. “But I had to use my initials when I applied, because what if I used my first name? It would have been not only no, but hell no,” she says.

Glass, who has been listening closely, nods in recognition.

“Rachel Balkovec did that,” she says, referring to the woman who this season became the first female to manage an MLB-affiliated minor league team as skipper of the New York Yankees’ Tampa Tarpons. Frustrated by lack of responses as she applied for baseball jobs earlier in her career, Balkovec changed the name on her resume to “Rae,” and the phone started ringing.

Alvarado had wedged a heel in the door, but was not universally accepted. Most jarringly, when she used the portable toilets on a job site, “There’d be pictures of me drawn in markers in various stages of undress,” she says. “Now that I’m more experienced in construction, I know that the mechanical companies use a different color marker than the electrical companies on projects and I could have tracked down who was doing it.” The crude graffiti was a shock, one she defrays with typical humor. “I didn’t know you could do so many things wearing only a hardhat—but at least they knew I was OSHA compliant, because I was always wearing a hardhat in the drawings.”

Undeterred, Alvarado picked up classes in estimating and computerized scheduling at Cal State Los Angeles. Construction was changing, with the work done with pencil and paper shifting to computers. “That was the point of differentiation because most men did not have that skill. I then got this really crazy idea that I could be a construction contractor,” she says.

Linda Alvarado ‘73 is founder, president and CEO of Alvarado Construction, a large commercial general contractor.

In 1976, she started Alvarado Construction, installing curbs, gutters and sidewalks. Having seen the estimates, bids, purchase orders, invoices and payments during her earlier position as an on-site contract administrator, she found ways to make up for her limited cash.

“I’d say, ‘Look, if you pay for the concrete, you will save the 20 percent markup that every subcontractor charges on the material. And it will assure you two-fold. It gets paid. I don’t have to pay for it. And you get a 20 percent reduction in materials.’ And that’s how I started moving forward to break the ‘concrete ceiling’ building small bus shelters.”

Today, Alvarado Construction is a large commercial contractor and development company that builds multimillion-dollar projects across the U.S. and internationally, and served as the general contractor for the Denver Broncos’ Empower Field stadium. 

Alvarado has served on the boards of 3M Co., Pitney Bowes International, the Pepsi Bottling Group, United Banks of Colorado and Lennox International. But those early days were not easy.

“I needed cash to grow, applied for loans, and was turned down by six banks,” she recalls. “Without talking to me, my parents took out a double-digit interest loan on their two-room adobe house for $2,500. It was terrifying, but it was also a serious motivator because they would lose everything if I didn’t succeed. I paid the loan back, but I’ll never be able to repay them.”

Becoming a Scout

By late afternoon Glass is sitting in the metal stands at a school whose name she couldn’t resist: Pomona High in the Denver suburb of Arvada. She’s as incognito among the parents and fans as one can be with a stopwatch in her hand and a radar gun in the black bag she carries. But even the Rockies-purple puff jacket she wears on a changeable Colorado spring day doesn’t betray that she is someone who could help a diamond in the rough get drafted—or downgrade a hot prospect with high hopes.

Finding talent in Colorado, where the season starts late and is often interrupted by snow, can be a challenge. But it happens. “High risk, high reward,” Glass says. “It’s not like Texas, California or Florida.” But there are players to be found, and the state has produced some standout pitchers. “Roy Halladay, Kyle Freeland,” she says, referring to the late Hall of Famer and a current Rockies left-hander.

When a player she is there to see comes to the plate, Glass readies her stopwatch.

“You don’t want to see a hitter swing and not make contact. You can’t swing and miss and be a pro prospect,” she says. He hits a ground ball, and she clicks her stopwatch to see how fast he runs from home to first. “Average-plus speed,” she says, consulting a Rockies rating chart she carries with her.

The other team comes to the plate, and a batter hits a sharp grounder to the infielder she is there to see. He can’t handle it. “That ate him up,” she says. She knows it is just one play in a season, but it’s the one she saw.

That’s part of what makes scouting so challenging, the happenstance of it. “And there are so many intangibles, things you can’t predict,” she says, like a player’s personal drive, whether they’re done growing or just starting, what kind of teammate they’ll be. So many things in analyzing prospects make Glass think back to things she heard at Pomona, ideas like cost-benefit analysis and another particular refrain from Professor of Politics David J. Menefee-Libey.

“Like DML always says, policy analysis and evaluation depend on what type of data can be collected and analyzed,” she says. “We know what we can see or evaluate. We don’t know what we can’t see or what is missing. Player evaluation is a lot like that.”

Glass didn’t set out to become a scout, but has kept building a career in baseball almost like a sailor tacking, catching whatever wind she can and then finding another way to move forward when it shifts.

Her first semester at Pomona, she chose a Critical Inquiry seminar called Baseball in America, taught by Lorn Foster, now an emeritus professor. She studied abroad in Spain to hone the Spanish skills that helped her break into baseball. Her senior year, she wrote her thesis in public policy analysis on a renowned program for disadvantaged youth called Reviving Baseball in the Inner Cities (RBI). From there, Glass won a coveted Watson Fellowship, which provides a stipend—now up to $40,000—for a new graduate to engage in a year of independent research abroad. Glass studied international baseball while traveling to seven countries, including the Dominican Republic, Japan and Australia.

With the help of Ng—the Marlins’ GM she has long admired—Glass landed an MLB internship in the Dominican, working with youth development and education programs. It still took almost two years of applying and interviewing while working elsewhere to get hired by a major league organization, but in 2018 the Marlins named her the education coordinator on the player development staff. She worked in that role for more than 3½ years, helping Spanish-speaking players learn English and skills for life in the U.S. while promoting Spanish-language skills among English-speakers to build team camaraderie. When the position was eliminated, at first Glass didn’t know where to turn.

“I always knew I had a passion for player evaluation. I didn’t know if I’d be able to break into it,” she says.

Emily Glass ’15 scouts high school talent at a game in the Denver area.

In a stroke of good luck, MLB was launching a Diversity Pipeline Scouting Development program last fall, and Glass was one of about 30 people selected for the intensive weeklong camp, half of them women. Working in a small group led by Jalal Leach, a pro scout she had known with the Marlins, Glass stood out. Danny Montgomery, the Rockies’ assistant general manager of scouting, heard about her. So did General Manager Bill Schmidt, who had drafted Leach out of college and been a mentor to him. As usual, Glass impressed people with her ability, drive and organizational skills everywhere she went, just as she had  impressed Hurdle, the former major league player and manager, when they met.

Her battles have been fewer than Alvarado faced in an era when sexism was unfettered by company policies and social expectations. There is a group of women in scouting and other baseball roles Glass checks in with frequently. But baseball is still a male world.

“I think kind of like what Linda is saying, I’m just an ‘actions speak louder than words’ person,” she says. “Trust takes time to build. It’s a process, like baseball. You keep at it every day, and over time it grows. I’ve been very much welcomed overall. You can focus on the bright side or not. I wouldn’t be here without the opportunities I’ve been given by the Rockies and prior to this. I’m very grateful for that.”

Alvarado nods.

“We’re very proud of what she’s doing,” she says.

They are two of the more visible women with the Rockies, but far from the only ones. Sue Ann McClaren is vice president of ticket sales, operations and services. Kim Molina is VP of human resources. And there are other women executives in communications, sales, marketing, corporate sponsorships, client services, engineering and facilities. Yet another is the manager of baseball research, which is a data analytics role, and two women, Jenny Cavnar and Kelsey Wingert, are part of the Rockies broadcast team for AT&T SportsNet.

Alvarado is intent on promoting talented women, but says being the first matters most because it usually means there will also be a second.

“I have sometimes been the first. But I do not want to be the only or the last,” Alvarado says. “Every time another woman succeeds, it opens doors.”