My Story

My story is based on building partnerships to achieve and searching beyond social convention to define our possibilities.

I come from an average Costa Rican family. My father is from Guanacaste (a rural area in the northern part of the country), and at the age of fourteen he decided to move to the capital because he wanted to study. It was like that, that he made a radical decision to change his “destiny” as a Guanacastecan farmer and he decided to create his own path. Today, 40 years later, he holds two Masters, has studied three different majors and owns his own company that has provided for his family.

During my youth I was expelled from high school, multiple times. It took me three attempts to obtain my high-school diploma because I bought the answers to the tests. Later, when I decided to take them the honest way, I had to start all over. After my turbulent passage through school and motivated by the death of several “friends” , I decided to make a change and focus my life on generating meaningful impact. From that moment on, I began a growing process and struggle to change so that I could break the vicious cycles that jeopardized my future.

I’m an entrepreneur every single day.  Nowadays, after many failures and attempts, I define myself as a world-class social and business entrepreneur, youth leader, lover of cultures and most importantly a family man. I believe that willpower drives a person to change from the inside – and the outside – and that same will turns dreams into facts. I own and founded Miguiaeducativa, I was the manager at Fundación Gente and now I am serving as a Partner Network Coordinator at the Social Progress Imperative.

I am passionate about social struggles.  Individual struggles can add up to big change and I know the drive and strength for social change exists in every person.  I have been invited to share my professional and personal experiences at events and places as varied as: Universities, places of worship, high-schools, ministries, NGOs, the Organization of American States, the UN and chosen Young Challenger through the foundation of a Nobel Peace Prize winner, a social leader.

I believe my experience can be useful for other people, young and old, in similar situations or in different context. This blog is for you as well as myself, to remind us that we can always grow, that there is always hope when you make the right choices, follow your heart and prepare yourself.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience