Diana Perez-Alvarado Is a Shining Example for Students

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More than once, Diana Perez-Alvarado found herself in jobs where she was making good money, but her heart wasn’t in it.

At one point, Perez-Alvarado was the top-grossing account manager at a media marketing firm, but it came at the cost of working 14-hour days and missing her young children. The technical side of her work—overseeing online ad campaigns and constantly monitoring their performance—eclipsed the relationship-building and regular human interaction that had once made the job enjoyable. A move from LA back to the East Coast provided Perez-Alvarado with the opportunity return to office and facilities management.

Now the senior director of facilities at East Coast-based Achievement First, a tuition-free public charter school network with schools in Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island, Perez-Alvarado has found her ideal environment. She balances her high-performing facilities professional role with serving as a role model for those who, like her, have had to fight for every step of their journey.

Over the past nine years, Perez-Alvarado has finally found alignment with an organization’s mission.

“I see myself in the kids who attend our schools,” explains Perez-Alvarado, who grew up in East Harlem, a neighborhood in New York City. She attended a performing arts high school that she says changed her life for the better and gave her a new perspective of the world around her. “Working for an organization that could do that for other kids was exactly what I was looking for.”

Achievement First schools are located in urban areas and provide opportunities to underserved communities. According to the charter school network’s 2023 annual report, Achievement First helped students land 3,519 college acceptance letters and graduated 517 students across six high schools in New York and Connecticut. Achievement First’s inaugural Rhode Island school will see its first high school graduating class in 2025. Seventy-six percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, 55 percent of students are Black/African American, and 40 percent are Hispanic/Latinx.

“When I first started, I remember walking into rooms and feeling like I’d walked onto another planet. But I refused to see myself as a victim or somehow disadvantaged.”

Diana Perez-Alvarado

A blind lottery determines students’ acceptance to the schools, but many students are the first in their families to graduate from college.

Perez-Alvarado began as a coordinator at Achievement First but steadily moved up into more senior roles, becoming senior director in 2022. Part of Perez-Alvarado’s attachment to her role comes from how, unlike most of her previous jobs, she could embrace her differences as strengths.

“It took me a while to feel comfortable in my own skin,” the senior director admits. “I’m this little Latina woman in construction. When I first started, I remember walking into rooms and feeling like I’d walked onto another planet. But I refused to see myself as a victim or somehow disadvantaged. Those experiences now drive my work to empower others.”

Perez-Alvarado manages people from a wide variety of backgrounds. She leads by caring for the whole person, recognizing individual strengths, creating an environment where her team members feel valued, and providing meaningful growth opportunities.

It took Perez-Alvarado’s entire team to support schools through the pandemic. As 2020 unfolded, the facilities team worked together to create guidelines, implement new strategies, and adapt to an environment that didn’t always allow for in-person instruction.

Given the multitude of different buildings the schools operate in, Perez-Alvarado said every school had to be addressed individually. Some buildings had window air conditioning units, others central air, but even central air systems varied in how they used recycled and outside air.

“Implementing guidelines and protocol for all of those buildings was a massive team effort,” Perez-Alvarado explains. “We added air purifiers to a lot of the schools. We converted to touchless faucets and water fountains. We completely reworked our custodial system and installed hospital-grade filtration systems.”

In addition to the overseeing the implementation of new standards as students returned to in-person learning, Perez-Alvarado and her team expertly managed the financial aspects involved in the massive facilities related reorganization projects.

While the pandemic provided once-in-a-lifetime growth experiences, Perez-Alvarado is now more focused on supporting more proactive growth opportunities for her direct reports. Thanks to her own manager, she’s never short of chances to grow.

“I am fortunate to have incredibly positive women encouraging and guiding me,” Perez-Alvarado explains. “If you had told me when I first started at Achievement First that I would be a senior director, I would never have believed you. But now I have the ability to provide those kinds of opportunities for others, and that means a lot to me.”

Perez-Alvarado also hopes that students she meets in the hallways of Achievement First schools see her as an example of what a Latina can do when she puts her mind to it.

“What makes my day is when a student comes up to me to ask what I do and how I got where I am,” Perez-Alvarado says. “They’re seeing me do it, and I can encourage and mentor them to find their own passion. I want them to feel encouraged and know that they can do great things.”

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