VIDA President and CEO Felida Villarreal knows how to advocate for and empower the Rio Grande Valley community—because this is her home, too. This Leading Latina is on a mission to bring opportunities to the valley and build a future where success is not limited by geography.
Written by XIMENA N. BELTRAN QUAN KIU
Photography + Video by CASS DAVIS
Design + Art Direction by ARTURO MAGALLANES
Perhaps this is why she’s uniquely qualified to lead the Valley Initiative for Development and Advancement (VIDA), a nonprofit organization focused on empowering Texas residents of the Rio Grande Valley through education, training, and career development.
Villarreal took on the role of president and CEO in 2022 when she was twenty-seven years old.
“I’m a firm believer that you don’t need to leave your community to be successful,” she says. “A lot of the younger generation has this mindset that they need to go to New York or to LA to be successful. Success is not determined by your education or by the college that you go to, or not even where you live. Success is really defined by your work ethic, your determination, and the impact that you’re willing to make. When you have the heart and the dedication to be the very best at what you do, you can find success anywhere.”
Before moving up to the C-suite, Villarreal, a certified public accountant, started at VIDA as the director of finance.
Under Villarreal’s leadership, the organization has doubled its budget and doubled its staff. During the beginning of the pandemic, it was servicing about four hundred participants annually. That number has also increased to 746, with the organization setting a target goal of meeting the needs of one thousand participants in 2025.
The ethnic demographic of RGV is 82.4 percent Hispanic, and has a population of nearly 3 million (when including both cities from the United States and Mexico)—it is one of the fastest growing regions in the US, and the combined binational population is expected to exceed 7 million by 2040. The Texas-specific population of RGV that VIDA serves is 1.4 million, a number that is greater than seven US states. Villarreal looks at the work VIDA is doing in Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy counties as building an ecosystem of support alongside opportunity.
“It’s not just about expanding accessibility to education. It’s about providing support services that directly impact [a participant’s] ability to be successful,” Villarreal explains. “When you have an adult learner that is juggling family responsibilities and now school and work, there’s a lot of barriers. Those barriers can either prevent individuals from not succeeding entirely or prolong their education significantly.”
CEO
Valley Initiative for Development and Advancement
Villarreal points to VIDA’s assistance for tuition, childcare, and transportation as offerings participants can tap into to get the infrastructure needed to meet the demands of their daily and personal lives, work obligations, and career aspirations.
“When you look at our student outcomes compared to those not receiving support services, the results are incredible,” Villarreal says. “Our graduation rates exceed 80 percent—substantially outperforming the national averages of 43.4 percent at public two-year institutions and 32 percent for Hispanic students.
“This achievement is particularly significant as the majority of our participants are Hispanic,” she continues. “Our persistence rates from year-to-year are above 90 percent and our job placement is also above 80 percent for our graduates. These holistic support services really impact college success.”
According to VIDA’s data, participants typically experience a 300 percent increase in annual earnings upon program completion. For every dollar invested in the community, the nonprofit estimates an almost $16 return on investment to the local economy.
VIDA does its work by partnering with a number of local organizations at the regional, state, and national level. Among them is the Texas Workforce Commission. The commission, based in Austin, helps get people trained or retrained and into the workforce, especially in critical industries such as healthcare, technology, advanced manufacturing, and skilled trades. Its purpose is to help strengthen the state’s economy.
“The valley is one of the areas that is fast growing, has a definite demand, and a very capable workforce that just needs the right support and opportunities,” says Edward Serna, executive director of the Texas Workforce Commission. “We’re working together with local organizations [like VIDA] and schools to help us create a strong workforce that’s engaged, educated, and benefits from economic prosperity.
“Her organization is giving them not only financial support, but more importantly, what I’ll call moral support or counseling support,” Serna continues. “VIDA is helping individuals stay encouraged, not get frustrated or give up, and therefore we’re getting some of the workforce that we need in critical areas.”
Felida Villarreal leads a leadership workshop with VIDA students at South Texas College.
When Villarreal stepped into her new role with VIDA as president and CEO, she inherited an organization that was “financially healthy, stable, and meeting all contractual benchmarks.” She says it could have been easy to stay the course and continue to keep doing what they were doing. However, she thought it was worth exploring new paths of funding. Federal grants became a target she set for the organization, in addition to the regional and state funding it was already successfully securing.
This led to VIDA partnering with several other local organizations to secure multiyear, million-dollar grants. One of them was a five-year $3 million grant awarded in 2023 by the US Department of Labor, as part of the Nursing Expansion Grant Program. The fund was designed to support public-private partnerships aimed at training and addressing the labor shortage of nursing professionals.
The Texas nonprofit was part of a tiny pool of twenty-five organizations, from seventeen different states, to receive the Nursing Expansion Grant—and the only organization in the state to get a piece of the $78 million funds. Partners on the initiative with VIDA included thirteen regional hospitals, the Lower Rio Grande Valley Workforce Development Board, Workforce Solutions Cameron, South Texas College, Texas State Technical College–Harlingen, Texas Southmost College, Texas Nurses Association, and Valley Interfaith.
In early 2025, the Trump administration began creating confusion and eroding confidence on whether federal funding would be something the organization can depend on.
“Beginning of this year with the federal funding freeze, there was tremendous uncertainty, especially because we are a nonprofit that is directly funded by the Department of Labor,” says Villarreal, who spoke with Hispanic Executive in late February. “We faced significant concerns about whether our funding would be delayed or disrupted entirely. While our current contracts have been honored thus far, we’re operating in an environment of continued unpredictability. The financial landscape remains precarious, and we’re constantly strategizing to ensure program continuity despite these external challenges.”
The CEO remains steadfast on diversifying funding opportunities so that VIDA isn’t hampered from doing its work by relying on only one source of funding. In mid-February 2025, VIDA was awarded a $604,000 Texas Innovative Adult Career Education (ACE) Grant from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Funds will go into immediate effect to help continue support of programs that include financial assistance for education and training, job placement assistance, and wraparound services, such as childcare.
And in late 2024, an $800,000 grant came through from Ascendium Education Group to participate in a prestigious national randomized controlled trial to evaluate VIDA’s program effectiveness and its impact on underserved populations. The study’s findings will guide how VIDA and other organizations optimize resources to achieve the most significant impact.
“We’re always looking to diversify our funding sources to make sure that we’re able to achieve long term sustainability,” Villarreal says. “Our deliberate expansion into federal grant opportunities was just the beginning of this strategy. We’re now intensifying our outreach to private foundations and national philanthropic organizations as well. But this approach isn’t just about survival—it’s about creating the financial resilience necessary to scale our impact regardless of political or economic uncertainties.”
This challenge is not unique to VIDA. Less than 1 percent of philanthropic dollars in the US go toward causes benefiting Latino communities. Latino-led organizations across the country face significant funding disparities despite their widespread impact. “That [stat] continues to be disappointing,” she says. “But it also serves as a powerful reminder of the responsibility we collectively have to change this narrative. We must advocate not just for our organization, but for the entire ecosystem of Latino-led nonprofits creating transformative impact nationwide despite these resource constraints.”
It’s a topic Villarreal bonded with during an interview with Julián Castro, former US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Barack Obama and current CEO of the Latino Community Foundation.
“Collaboration is key,” Villarreal adds on what it will take to address these disparities. “Having strong partners at different levels of government and the nation is an asset to be able to change those statistics and redirect resources to Latino communities at a scale that matches their contributions and needs.”
By joining forces, Villarreal believes Latino-led organizations can amplify their impact and push for the funding and resources needed to sustain their work.
For Villarreal, regret is far worse than failure.
“I’d rather say I tried something and it didn’t work out, than to live with myself thinking ‘Oh, what if I had done this, or what if I had tried that?’” Villarreal says. “This willingness to take risks and challenge the status quo is what consistently propels me toward innovation.”
She has always been driven by the belief that it’s better to try and fall short than to live with unanswered “what ifs.” That mindset has shaped her journey—most recently leading her back to a long-held dream of becoming a lawyer. After years of putting her legal aspirations on hold due to distance and family commitments, a new opportunity emerged that made law school a reality.
“We’re in a very small, tight-knit community here,” Villarreal says. “So, I never left to go to college. I always stayed here with my family. I attended the local university, and we don’t have a local law school; the closest one would be a four-hour drive away. That was probably the biggest obstacle that prevented me from going.”
When Ohio Northern University (ONU) announced its approval from the American Bar Association (ABA) to begin offering one of the country’s only fully online, part-time juris doctor programs, Villarreal applied and was accepted—a life decision she says only intimate family and friends know about. At the time, ONU was one of only six schools in the nation to have such an offering. There are currently only eight.
“When that longstanding barrier suddenly dissolved through this online opportunity, I saw it as a way to finally fulfill that long-term dream that I had,” Villarreal says. “I honestly don’t know exactly where this path is taking me, but that’s the exciting part.”
Her motivation for pursuing a law degree also stems from her advocacy for overlooked communities.
“I’m completely convinced that broadening what I know and understand will open doors I can’t even imagine yet—both for me personally and for our work at VIDA,” she explains. “It’s really about seizing learning opportunities whenever they appear. That’s not just how I approach things; it’s how we’ve built our culture here. We’re always asking, ‘How can we get better? What can we learn?’ When learning becomes available to everyone and old barriers come down, the people and organizations who jump in and take advantage are the ones who’ll find new solutions and stay ahead of the curve. That’s what drives me every day.”
Villarreal takes her work seriously, and her biggest asset is being part of the community she serves. It gives her a unique perspective to understand its needs and pain points. By putting down roots in RGV at an early age, she inadvertently began the work of helping build a future for her community where success is not limited by geography. She’s bringing in opportunities instead of chasing them.
“I hope my partners and our community see me as a leader that genuinely cares about our people,” she says. “We all come from different backgrounds—whether it’s low-income, first-generation college, or having an immigrant heritage. One way or another, we can all relate to each other, and my ultimate goal is being someone that can help others in need.”
That sense of purpose drives Villarreal. She is focused on her mission to create opportunities for the people around her. For the CEO, small acts of support can have a compound effect and create meaningful change.
“I think if you’re able to even just impact one individual life, that’s a huge success, because that’s how we’re able to achieve bigger outcomes,” she says. “Vida means life in Spanish, so we say, ‘Educating one vida at a time.’ At the end of the day, if we’re able to make our community a better place by just impacting one individual, then that’s absolutely transformational.”
For Villarreal, the goal is simple: to uplift and empower her community—one vida at a time.
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Frannie Sprouls
SENIOR EDITOR
Melaina Cecilia de la Cruz
AUTHOR
Ximena N. Beltran Quan Kiu
DESIGN + ART DIRECTION
Arturo Magallanes
PHOTO MANAGER + VIDEO DIRECTOR
Cass Davis
WEB DEVELOPMENT
José Reinaldo Montoya
BANNER IMAGE
Cass Davis/with AI
meet the 2025 leading latinas
VIEW THE COMPLETE LIST→
© 2024 Guerrero LLC. All rights reserved.
Hispanic Executive is a registered trademark of Guerrero LLC.
1500 W Carroll Suite 200, Chicago, IL 60607