EARLY INSPIRATIONS: Vargas Jasa as a toddler with her parents, Olga and Gustavo ( below ), dressed as Wonder Woman ( middle ), and with her mom on her college graduation day ( right ). Olga graduated from college the same year Carla graduated from high school, a testament to her perseverance. NOV/DEC 2021 | 56 | FRONTDOORS MEDIA A job at a law firm convinced her that wasn’t her style, so she pivoted again and pinpointed the nonprofit sector as an area where she could directly impact human rights issues. She took her degree and left Berkeley, heading south for a job in community relations at Orange County United Way. She started in 1999, working as a liaison to several regional nonprofits and those in the Latino community. “United Way is such a unique organization in that it has a bird’s eye view of issues in any given community and can see how to pull the pieces of the puzzle together to create solutions that are needed,” she said. “I was excited to raise my hand whenever a new opportunity came up.” Over time, Vargas Jasa grew into a number of different roles, including leading corporate and major donor fund development. Around the time she was helping to launch Orange County United Way’s ambitious 10-year community impact plan, FACE 2024, her now-husband Steve was recruited for a job in Scottsdale. Vargas Jasa wanted to get FACE 2024 well established and Steve promised that if he took the job, they would see each other every weekend. “I like to say that he was our advance team for coming out here,” she said. Thanks to his move, Vargas Jasa got to know both the community and Valley of the Sun United Way. “This is one of the top United Ways in the country and one that I’d admired from afar for many, many years,” she said. So when a call from a recruitment firm came, Vargas Jasa, then five years into FACE 2024 and well ahead of goals, found herself interested in the opportunity to grow as a leader. “I was intrigued and intimidated, but my husband encouraged me to pursue it,” she said. Among other things, the job offered the couple a chance to actually share a roof. “We weren’t married at the time, and we’d never permanently lived together. We ultimately decided to formally submit my interest,” she said. A few months later, Vargas Jasa walked in the door as Valley of the Sun United Way’s new CEO. “I’m not going to lie. I was apprehensive about whether I could do this job, given how much bigger an organization it was than Orange County United Way. I always thought I would come here to work for the next CEO,” she said. “But once I committed to it, I was all in.” She entered with a 100-day plan of how she wanted to approach joining the community and understanding what stakeholders wanted from Valley of the Sun United Way. Vargas Jasa held almost 150 meetings with corporate and nonprofit partners, donors, community leaders and philanthropists, as well as United Way staff and board members, to hear their perceptions of the organization and integrate what she heard into plans. “I asked people to be very candid and, because I was new to the community, they were,” Vargas Jasa said. “I heard that we could strive to be more reflective of the community and understand the needs of nonprofits working deep within it.” Her objective was for 2020 to be an inflection point for Valley of the Sun United Way, commemorating its 95 th anniversary as well as the conclusion of its 10-year strategic/impact plan launched in 2010. Vargas Jasa’s team developed a plan for community engagement and invited about 150 stakeholders to join the first session in March — just as COVID hit the Valley. In a blink, Vargas Jasa went from being the new CEO in town to one of the Valley’s most visible executives leading in the pandemic. She paused long-range planning and focused on the demands of 2020, leveraging those meetings already planned to focus on responding to what nonprofit partners told her they needed. Valley of the Sun United Way immediately launched the United for the Valley COVID-19 Fund and started providing weekly grants to partners responding to community needs.

FRONTDOORS MEDIA | 57 | NOV/DEC 2021 FRONTDOORS MEDIA | 57 | NOV/DEC 2021 United Way is such a unique organization in that it has a bird’s eye view of issues in any given community and can see how to pull the pieces of the puzzle together to create solutions that are needed. “We kept driving forward, to plan forward, to make good on our 2020 priorities at the same time that we were responding to COVID-19,” Vargas Jasa said. While responding to the pandemic, Valley of the Sun United Way also re-evaluated all of its work through the lenses of diversity, equity, access and inclusion and created MC2026, a five-year plan for Mighty Change in Maricopa County. By any measure, 2020 was a monumental year. And then the emails came. “In November, I started to get these random emails from someone claiming that they were contacting me on behalf of an anonymous donor,” Vargas Jasa said. She took a bit of time to consider if the messages were part of a scam, but when a call was set up, the person revealed that she represented the billionaire, MacKenzie Scott. Scott — one of the world’s wealthiest people after co-founding Amazon with her then-husband Jeff Bezos — wanted to address equity issues and support organizations that had responded to the COVID-19 crisis in ways she admired. Accordingly, she wanted to give Valley of the Sun United Way $25 million to support their work. Vargas Jasa was working from home when she took the call. “My husband was at our dining room table on a Zoom meeting and I was like the little kid in the Cox commercial, running back and forth, screaming when he thinks he got a million dollars,” she said. The MacKenzie Scott gift was astonishing not just in its size. The millions flew into the bank unrestricted, no strings attached, catalyzing the launch of Valley of the Sun United Way’s Mighty Change 2026, a bold plan focused on