Juan Sepulveda

Juan is the President of The Common Enterprise, an organization whose mission is to provide high quality organizational and management consulting services to nonprofit organizations, foundations, governments, and businesses interested in serving their communities.

By offering these services, we hope to make these organizations more effective in the public work they perform and as a result help them build stronger communities across America. The Common Enterprise offers a full range of customized consulting services.

In short, we strive to make organizations and individuals stronger and more effective by helping them get clear about who they are, where they are, what they want to do, and how they can accomplish these dreams, especially during tough times.

We are committed to continuous learning and expanding our knowledge base and value by linking with local, state, and national groups that are working in related community-building arenas.

Juan, a San Antonian, who grew up in a working class Mexican-American neighborhood in Topeka, Kansas has been involved in community organizing and politics since the age of 16 when he was the first high school student hired to work for the Kansas Secretary of State. He has also worked closely with the late Willie Velasquez and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. He is currently completing a political biography of Willie and an organizational history of Southwest Voter.

Juan graduated from Harvard with a BA in Government; completed a combined degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at The Queen's College, Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; received his law degree from Stanford Law School; and has been admitted to the Texas Bar. Juan was the third Hispanic ever to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

Nationally, Juan is a board member of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the National Civic League, the Center for Policy Alternatives, the Communications Consortium Media Center, and MDC. He currently serves on the New Mexico Rhodes Scholar Selection Committee and has previously served as a member of the Arkansas Rhodes Scholar Selection Committee and the White House Presidential Internship Fund.

Juan was also a member of the Saguaro Seminar, a multi-year dialogue led by Harvard Professor Bob Putnam that focused on how we can increasingly build bonds of civic trust among Americans and their communities. The goal of the group was to develop practical strategies with national applicability for increasing Americans' connections with one another.

In 1997, Juan was selected as an American representative for the Migration Dialogue, an intensive three-day seminar for North American and European opinion leaders to consider, in an off-the-record setting, immigration issues in a comparative perspective. The 1997 gathering was held in Berlin, Germany and included site visits to Poland. These seminars permit elected officials, journalists and other leaders of opinion to learn about immigration issues in other industrial democracies. The 1997 group included representatives from Austria, France, Germany, Mexico, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.

Juan was one of 17 Americans internationally selected to participate in the French-American Foundation's Young Leaders program in 1998. Created in 1981, the program's purpose is to strengthen the relationship between France and the United States by bringing together young leaders in government, business, the media and the nonprofit sector to discuss transatlantic and global issues. Past participants have included President Bill Clinton, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley and former French Prime minister Alain Juppe.

In 1999, Juan was selected to be part of an American study group that examined the French Early Childhood Education System. The focus of the study group was the role of public education in the lives of two to five year olds in France and exploring the implications of the French successes for the United States.

Juan also served as a Senior Advisor for Bill Bradley's 2000 presidential campaign. His main responsibilities were coordinating and leading the campaign's national Latino efforts including political organizing; constituency outreach; media outreach--both earned and paid media, radio and television, in both English and Spanish; issue and policy development; surrogate work; and the development of English and Spanish language materials aimed at the Latino community.

Locally, he is a board member of the San Antonio Express-News Community Advisory Board, the San Antonio Medical Foundation, the San Antonio and Hill Country YMCA, The Holocaust Memorial of San Antonio, the Enterprise Foundation, the San Antonio Latino and Jewish Dialogue group and co-chair of the Schools Committee of the San Antonio Harvard-Radcliffe Club. Juan was a member of the City's Community Revitalization Action Group, Leadership San Antonio Class XXII 1996-97, and was named one of San Antonio's 40 Under 40 Rising Stars by the San Antonio Business Journal in January 1998. Juan is married to Teresa Niño. They have two children, Michael, 13 and Victoria, 11.