Latest news with #CityCollegeofSanFrancisco
Business Journals
08-07-2025
- Business
- Business Journals
Rising through the ranks: How an entry-level Amazon job turned into a leadership career
Giovanni Raff was studying at City College of San Francisco in 2017 when he picked up a part-time job at Amazon's delivery station. The shift was perfect for his schedule, allowing him to work in the mornings and attend class in the afternoon. What Raff didn't expect was for that job to turn into the launch point for a fast-moving career at one of the world's largest companies. After completing his associate degree in 2018, Raff joined Amazon full-time. He has advanced quickly, accepting a series of roles with increased responsibilities and now works in operations leadership at the company's San Francisco delivery station. The site runs four shifts with 172 employees, and Raff oversees all its day-to-day operations, as well as its area managers and planning. Raff is one of many Amazon managers and leaders who started in an entry-level position and worked their way up. According to Amazon, the company has added nearly 1 million employees over the past decade, investing heavily in training and development. Within his first three months of full-time employment, for example, Raff was invited to join Amazon's ambassador program, an experience that included training other employees. 'It was a great opportunity to fast-track my manager skills,' he said. 'I went to school for business, so it was awesome.' On the fast track Amazon's growth has fueled even more opportunities for advancement. In 2024 alone, the company added more than 10 million square feet of warehouse and data center space in North America, opening dozens of facilities. Each fulfillment center, delivery station and same-day delivery site needs hundreds or even thousands of employees, creating opportunities for employees to move up into new roles. Raff has had a front-row seat to Amazon's growth. His first full-time role was as a process assistant, essentially serving as an assistant manager during a fulfillment center shift. He began that job in August 2018, and two months later, as the company's peak season began, his manager went on parental leave. 'There were minimal managers in the Bay Area region, which was very small at the time with only three sites,' Raff said. 'My regional manager asked me to stretch into the role, and I jumped at the opportunity.' It was challenging. The site had its busiest season ever, and Raff and his team processed more than twice as many packages that year than the year before while also leading the region in safety. Stretching into that role paid off. Raff has continued to advance into roles with increased responsibilities. He supported multiple sites, coached managers and worked to enhance operations efficiency. Along the way, he participated in multiple Amazon training programs, including gaining his green belt certification in the Lean Six Sigma management methodology. He even spent two years overseeing the onboarding and development programs for 15 sites. 'The culture is really good,' he said. 'I've enjoyed working with a great group of people and seeing their progression as well.' Corporate support Now that he is in a larger leadership role, Raff works to support those who are just getting started at Amazon in finding their own career paths. He recently partnered an entry-level associate with someone in a manager role, and the associate advanced four levels in two months. 'Sometimes, all it takes is showing an employee what opportunities exist,' Raff said. 'A lot of people just see work as work,' he said. 'But you have these opportunities to step into something different and take a career chance.' Raff encourages his employees to utilize Amazon's education and training benefit, Career Choice. More than 200,000 people have participated in the program, which includes access to pre-paid tuition for associate degrees, bachelor's degrees and certificate programs at more than 600 schools, as well as other certifications and education assistance. Career Choice, as well as Amazon's comprehensive benefits that include health insurance and a 401(k) match, is available to entry-level employees starting on their first day of employment. 'You're getting these great benefits that most people take years and years to progress to get,' Raff said. People-first leadership However, Raff said his biggest focus as a leader isn't on the nuts and bolts of fulfillment or even on promoting Amazon's benefits and training opportunities to employees. Instead, it is on the more nuanced and human side of leadership. He strives to reinforce Amazon's culture of supporting your peers and encouraging each other to take risks in order to innovate, even if that sometimes leads to failure. 'I want to continue to develop for myself and my entire team the understanding that yes, we have a job to do, but we're people-leaders first,' Raff said. 'We know we're delivering packages. We have same-day delivery and all these other metrics that we aim to achieve, but at the end of the day, it's the people behind the packages that make Amazon magic.' As for his own career, Raff has his sights set on leading his own station and, ultimately, region. In his time in his current role, Raff said the San Francisco delivery station has moved from being last in quality to No. 1 for 26 consecutive weeks. 'It took a while, but we got there,' Raff said. 'I'm really excited about that. We have grown so much.'
San Francisco Chronicle
12-06-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘I do not feel safe': City College of S.F. instructor shaken by union leader's verbal attack
An instructor at City College of San Francisco says she is concerned for her safety a week after a union leader ridiculed her Jewish name and called her a 'colonizer' during a 90-second, expletive-laden rant at a public board meeting as the school's trustees looked on. 'The trustees don't have my back,' Abigail Bornstein, a computer science instructor, told the Chronicle on Wednesday. 'I'm out here on my own.' In addition to calling Bornstein a 'colonizer,' an apparent reference to Israel, Maria Salazar-Colon, president of the campus chapter of the Service Employees International Union Local 1021, mocked Bornstein's name, calling her 'Abigail Dumbstein.' Bornstein reported the May 29 incident to the college's human resources department and, on Wednesday, to campus police Chief Mario Vazquez, saying in the email she shared with the Chronicle: 'I do not feel safe on campus.' The union is powerful, she added: 'This is David vs. Goliath.' By not halting the verbal attack, the board appeared to violate its own policy recommending that the trustees bar 'profanity, obscenity, and other offensive language' at meetings, Bornstein said in her police report. City College is under a warning sanction for three accreditation violations by its trustees — including that they fail to follow their own policies. Although the college is fully accredited, it has been unable to receive a seven-year extension of its accreditation since January 2024, when the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges slapped it with the warning, its mildest sanction. College officials told the accreditors in February that they are addressing the trustees' violations, including by trying to hire a permanent chancellor to replace the interim chancellor who has held the position for the past year. The accreditors were meeting Thursday and Friday to determine whether to lift the sanction, extend it or add to it. The accreditors told the Chronicle they are also looking carefully at City College's efforts to hire a chancellor, a process that has stalled just three weeks before the interim leader is expected to vacate the position. Asked Wednesday why the college's Board of Trustees did not stop the verbal attack on the instructor, Anita Martinez, the board's president, told the Chronicle that she had referred the question to City College interim President Mitchell Bailey. Bailey then shared a statement from Martinez and Luis Zamora, the board's vice president, supporting civility and apologizing 'to those who experienced such incivility.' The incident happened shortly after 11 p.m. at the trustees' last board meeting, after Bornstein began speaking at hour 6:57:50 on the recording. Bornstein, who frequently addresses the trustees about the college's precarious budget, spent her two-minute time slot opposing something that the SEIU — which represents hundreds of staff members — dearly wants: for the college to reopen its contract negotiations and provide a raise to match the 14% pay increase won by the faculty union over the past three years. Basing salary decisions on the idea that 'if they get that, I get this — that is not how we should be budgeting,' Bornstein said, urging the board to instead adjust pay based on what the competition earns elsewhere. After another speaker a few minutes later, Salazar-Colon, the union president, told the trustees that she was going to speak about 'that big mouth that's always in here.' 'I really wish that that colonizer, Abigail Dumbstein, would shut her damn mouth and not speak on SEIU items,' Salazar-Colon said, saying the instructor was 'dumber than a bag of rocks.' Salazar-Colon said Bornstein shouldn't meddle in fiscal issues, which she called 'our damn business.' She then said Bornstein should 'shut the f— up. … I'm sick of her s—. Shut the f— up.' One of the trustees, Aliya Chisti, interjected: 'President Martinez, we need to make sure that we're mindful of the comments that are being made.' But Salazar-Colon was allowed to go on. 'I'm gonna make whatever comment I want because I'm tired of it,' she said, criticizing the trustees for allowing Bornstein to frequently address the board, and urging them to 'put her in her place.' Bornstein later told the Chronicle that the 'attack on me was so vile. President Martinez should have hit her gavel within the first five seconds when Maria said 'that colonizer Abigail Dumbstein.' She did nothing.' Salazar-Colon told the Chronicle she was referring questions to a spokesperson, who sent a response on behalf of the union leader: 'While the wording could have been different, the intention was not to disparage anyone's religion or culture but express an ongoing frustration with Ms. Bornstein, based on her repeated undermining of our union's efforts to lift up (college staff) of all religions, cultures, and backgrounds.' Bornstein also reported to the police and to the trustees that she received a follow-up email from Salazar-Colon that she considered threatening for its aggressive tone and because it concluded: 'Good riddance.' That email, which Bornstein shared with the Chronicle, demanded that Bornstein 'stop with your deranged, racist, elitist, horrible, filthy lies that come out of your spiteful mouth! It seems like you might be feeling a bit envious!' The email said, in all capital letters, 'YOU LACK THE POWER TO STOP OR CONTROL SEIU, AND YOU NEVER WILL! ACCEPT THAT, COLONIZER!' Bornstein later emailed the board, saying that she had not slept well since the meeting and the 'antisemitic, vile attack on me.' Darlene Alioto, chair of the college's Department Chairpersons Council, criticized the board's tolerance of the attack in an email to the trustees that she shared with the Chronicle. The message was one of many calls and emails the board received condemning the attack. 'This behavior would not be allowed in my classroom; this behavior would not be allowed in my home. Why is it allowed at board meetings?' Alioto wrote, calling the board's acceptance of the rant 'disgusting' and Salazar-Colon's follow-up email to Bornstein 'antisemitic.' In their apology, Martinez and Zamora acknowledged that the trustees 'did not do enough to uphold the standards of respect that our community deserves.' Going forward, they wrote, the board 'will no longer tolerate such behavior' and was 'committed to reinforcing the expectation that all voices can be heard without fear of intimidation or harm.' The accrediting commission, which was meeting this week, has 30 days to issue its decision about the status of City College's sanction.
San Francisco Chronicle
23-05-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
City College of San Francisco poised to select outsider as chancellor over interim chief
Veteran educator Carlos Osvaldo Cortez is expected to be named next week as the 11th chancellor in 13 years to lead the financially troubled City College of San Francisco, edging out the interim chancellor, the Chronicle has learned. The seven trustees are in contract negotiations with Cortez, and a majority favor him over Interim Chancellor Mitch Bailey, said knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Bailey has fallen out of favor with the faculty union, which strongly influences the majority on the seven-member board of trustees. The chancellor selection echoes a constant debate at City College over the best approach to restoring the college to good fiscal health and increasing enrollment. The faculty union and its supporters on the board want to dip into reserves to boost spending, saying this approach is the best way to attract more students. By contrast, Bailey says he wants to 'adjust college operations to align with current resources,' a practice that matches expectations of accreditors and state officials. The college has been under an accreditation warning sanction over its governance and finances since early 2024. Chancellor selections are secretive, with deliberations happening behind closed doors. At City College, they are a near-annual ritual. If approved, possibly at the May 29 board meeting, Cortez would become the school's fifth permanent head since 2012. There have been six interim chancellors during that time. The selection of Cortez over Bailey would be the second time in a year that the trustees have replaced a chancellor who sought greater financial stability by aligning spending with revenue. Cortez is seen as faculty-friendly. In the San Diego Community College District, where Cortez was chancellor from summer 2021 through spring 2023, faculty pay increased modestly, by an average of 2.5% in 2022 and 4.5% a year later, after a period of small increases before he arrived. Cortez quit that job after a year and a half. He was paid a total of $1.36 million during his short tenure, including $546,601 for his final four months, according to Transparent California, a database of California public employee salaries. While chancellor in San Diego, Cortez made news in 2022 when he was forced to cancel his belated welcoming ceremony at Petco Park after receiving complaints for inviting Alice Walker as keynote speaker. The Pulitzer-Prize winning author of 'The Color Purple' has for years been accused of antisemitism, including for penning a poem in which she called the Talmud, the book of Jewish law, 'poison,' and for her support of conspiracy-theorist David Icke. After 20 months on the job, Cortez announced in March 2023 that he was taking 'extended emergency leave' to care for his ill parents. On May 1, district officials announced that he had resigned to be with his parents in Florida. By that fall, however, he was a finalist for the chancellor's job in three Bay Area college districts: Peralta in the East Bay, Contra Costa and San Mateo. Court records show that on Jan. 19, 2024, police in Florida arrested Cortez on suspicion of driving under the influence. Ultimately, he pled no contest to the reduced charge of reckless driving. In a phone conversation, Cortez declined to answer a reporter's questions without authorization from City College. But he said the Florida charge was due to a 'mixture of prescription medicine.' While Bailey has not suggested layoffs, he has adopted an approach that acknowledges financial instability at the college of 44,000 full- and part-time students. Salaries eat up 90% of the general fund, compared with 82% statewide, and next year the college will lose millions of dollars in extra state funding that has kept it afloat since 2018 due to severe enrollment loss. Reserves are at 16% of general fund expenditures, far below the 33% average across other colleges. Among the ideas Bailey references in a May 8 budget update are reducing the number of single classes that attract few students and currently make up 70% of academic offerings. Instead, Bailey wants faculty to consider teaching more groups of classes that carry large numbers of students toward their degrees. It's an idea that does not sit well with the union, the American Federation of Teachers, Local 2121. 'In a dizzyingly shallow presentation, Interim Chancellor proposes cuts to 70% of College with no analysis,' the union headlined its essay accusing Bailey of targeting ethnic studies classes. The union essay called for 'serious leadership' that would tap into its $31 million reserves to pay for more academics, not less. Alexis Litzky, a communications professor and outgoing chair of the Academic Senate, called the union's description of Bailey's idea for boosting more popular classes a 'mischaracterization of the chancellor's presentation.' She said Bailey is not suggesting that the college axe classes but that faculty review course offerings so that City College can 'evaluate options for updating our programs and schedules.' The Academic Senate works with both the union and administrators. Litzky said the college has been confronting its accreditation missteps by working with a state assistance team, and that Bailey's budget workshops have been helpful in educating the college community about its finances. 'It actually feels like we're going in the right direction,' she said. Cortez, 50, earned his doctorate at the University of Southern California, focusing on 'African American Womanist political historical contributions to social welfare and education policy reform,' according to his employment bio. During his academic career as an instructor and administrator, Cortez served as dean of instruction at Berkeley City College and, before becoming chancellor in San Diego, was president of San Diego College of Continuing Education. The Chronicle reached out to trustees in each of the Bay Area college districts where Cortez applied since leaving San Diego, as well as to trustees of Madison College and Pasadena City College, where he was a finalist in April 2024 before he withdrew his name from consideration. Cortez told the Chronicle he had decided he didn't want to live in Madison. Only one trustee responded, agreeing to comment without being identified because the person was not authorized to speak about it publicly. 'He is very charismatic. He dazzled us,' said the board member from Pasadena. But the college did not select Cortez as its leader. The trustee declined to say why. San Diego trustees did not respond to requests for comment. Professor Inna Kanevsky, who teaches psychology at San Diego Mesa College and got into a public dispute with Cortez over the Alice Walker episode, said she was 'sad to hear' that he was the leading candidate at City College. Cortez drew ire from the free-speech group FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — when he blocked Kanevsky on social media after she complained that the Walker invitation would harm Jewish students. FIRE told the college district that the action violated Kanvesky's First Amendment rights. The chancellor then deleted his own account.
