It took a six-pack of Budweiser, a lot of persuading from an old friend and a life-long passion to serve his community to convince Pete Garcia that he should be president and CEO of Chicanos Por La Causa.
Almost 24 years later, Garcia is leaving the community development corporation he helped become one of the largest of its kind in the nation. His work, however, is not done. He will take over a new organization called The Victoria Foundation, which will try to increase Latino philanthropy in Arizona.
“My goal is to raise $100 million [through the Victoria Foundation]. It can be done and if you look at the needs in our community, it has to be done,” said Garcia.
Acquiring this amount of money, he said, will take him five to seven years. He plans on convincing Latinos to reinvest some of their disposable income into the community in order to fund micro grants for small organizations that need help expanding.
“We need Latinos to step up now. Usually we ask everybody else to step up, so now we need to get our folks to step up,” he said.
Garcia’s work began in the 1970s, when he started a program in Phoenix for troubled youth.
When the program received little support, Garcia decided to join Chicanos Por La Causa as the economic development aide, which he’d heard about through his lifelong friend Tommy Espinoza, former president of CPLC and president and CEO of Raza Development Fund at the National Council of La Raza.
Over the years Garcia was promoted to almost every position, running everything from the social service to the youth program, which he founded.
When Espinoza decided to leave Chicanos Por Las Causa, he knew just the man to take over. Espinoza and Garcia had known each other since they were children in south Phoenix and had remained close.
But their friendship wasn’t why he knew Garcia was the best man for the job.
“It became very clear to me that he had all the leadership talents that were needed to run CPLC… He always delivered on his programs and he ran a variety [of them],” said Espinoza. “Pete had this strong sense of really helping the underdog. That’s driven Pete from the time I’ve known him.”
Chicanos Por La Causa now has $70 million budget
Chicanos Por La Causa was founded during the 1960s when Arizona State University students from south Phoenix wanted to address racial discrimination, ethnic tension, and poverty in their community. In 1969, the group officially incorporated under the name Chicanos Por La Causa, Inc. (CPLC). 
Its first major campaign brought attention to the unfair treatment of Chicano students in Phoenix’s public school system. The committee announced that Chicano students would not attend classes until the Phoenix school system hired more Latino teachers & counselors. The boycott ended 40 days later when school officials agreed to meet the demands.
Today the group runs charter schools, a migrant Head Start program, does business lending and training and is involved in social services.
When Garcia took over the organization, it had a $3 million budget with an 80-person staff. Today, it employs 900 people and has a $70 million budget.
“One of my things was that the way we got CPLC to grow is that we were always looking for ways to diversify the budget so we wouldn’t be dependent on one funding source,” said Garcia.
“And the other was trying to address the issues of the community and they expressed needs to our board of directors. We needed to do certain things — domestic violence, children, youth. As different organizations got into difficulty, they came to us and we took them over. And that helped CPLC get larger, not that we wanted to but we felt that politically that’s what we needed to do,” he said.
One of those organizations is Parenting Arizona, a nonprofit that aims to increase child safety.
“They had some financial difficulty and CPLC was able to step in and take over the program. That truly made us a statewide organization. We have 71 offices in 26 cities now,” said Garcia.
But what Garcia considers to be his biggest accomplishments, besides “just doing his job,” are the leadership development programs in Phoenix that the organization has contributed to and the partnerships that have allowed the group to give away more than $3.5 million in student scholarships in just the last four years.
Beginning Jan. 1, 2008, Garcia will shift his attention to The Victoria Foundation.
“I think that’ll be the most important job that I’ll have into the future…What I’m starting is the first Latino community foundation that addresses trying to bring Latinos to the table so that they can invest in helping our communities help themselves. And then maybe, I can retire,” he said.