Community Has Been Lifelong Hallmark of Retiring Administrator

Community Has Been Lifelong Hallmark of Retiring Administrator

By Brian Hiro

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Almost from the day she started as Cal State San Marcos' administrator in charge of community engagement more than a decade ago, Patricia Prado-Olmos was planning for when she would stop.

It would be when, because of her work and leadership, she was no longer essential.

Prado-Olmos' vision was for CSUSM to be so embedded in the community that no single person could wrap their arms around it.

"I wanted to work myself out of a job," Prado-Olmos said. "My marker was that community-engaged work would be so endemic across the institution that it would be a hallmark of who Cal State San Marcos is. We would hear about that as a hallmark in the community. And people on campus would be saying, 'Well, of course, that's what we do. That's part of who we are.'

"We're really at that point, and I think we've been at that point for a couple of years."

CSUSM will continue to build on its strong foundation in community engagement, keeping the work central to its identity. But Prado-Olmos has decided that, for her, it's time. At the end of the 2026-27 academic year, she will retire and conclude a 30-year career at CSUSM, including the last six as chief community engagement officer. She plans to make the transition to retired life gradually by spending the next year as a special assistant to President Ellen Neufeldt, focusing on key initiatives to support the university.

Prado-Olmos not only has served as a senior leader overseeing the Office of Community Relations & University Engagement, but she also has been a trusted confidante of Neufeldt as a member of the President's Advisory Team (PAT). Neufeldt said she remembers fondly Prado-Olmos' role in welcoming her to campus as a part of the presidential search committee in 2019.

"I am profoundly grateful for all that she has contributed to and shaped at our university," Neufeldt said. "I am also thankful that she will remain with us in the year ahead, continuing to support the institution to which she has given so much. Her wisdom and care have made me a better leader."

In many ways, community has been a touchstone for Prado-Olmos throughout her life. She grew up in El Monte, east of Los Angeles in the San Gabiel Valley, in a Mexican American community where family and working-class values were treasured. Her father was a firefighter, and she had uncles who were plumbers and foundry workers.

A first-generation college student, Prado-Olmos chose Pomona College, which felt many more miles from her hometown than the approximately 20 that actually separate the two locales.

"It wasn't until I got to college that I understood in really stark ways that there were people who didn't regard my background, my family, the schools I came from, the city I grew up in as having value," Prado-Olmos said. "I knew the value of my family and the languages and my community and everything that came with me, but it was not recognized or validated.

"So when I decided to stay in higher education - and I chose public education for very specific reasons - I said to myself, 'I'm going to work to change that narrative, where what communities bring is valued.' "

At the advice of a Pomona professor, who thought she would be a natural in the classroom, Prado-Olmos elected to pursue a doctorate in educational psychology at UC Santa Barbara. Her first teaching position was in the School of Education at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, where she immediately sought to embed herself in the local school districts.

Two years later, in 1995, Prado-Olmos found herself as a visiting professor back at Pomona, a university that didn't have a reputation for strong community ties. She tried to change that. Teaching an educational psychology class, she took her wide-eyed students on field trips to area schools to make observations.

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"It was kind of breaking the boundaries, but people at Pomona took notice," she said, adding that the college now boasts the Draper Center for Community Partnerships.

Prado-Olmos, though, truly found the alignment between her personal philosophy and a university's mission when her third faculty position brought her to CSUSM in 1997. Hired as a professor in what then was called the College of Education, she had been teaching for only a couple of years when she was given a chance to build an internship credential program with school districts in the Temecula Valley, a region where CSUSM now has a secondary campus but then was largely unmined territory.

"An assistant professor two years in rarely gets those kinds of opportunities," Prado-Olmos said.

Opportunities kept coming for Prado-Olmos, and she kept seizing them - further ensconcing herself in both the campus and external communities. She said yes to an offer to move into the administration as associate dean of the College of Education under Mark Baldwin. She accepted a job as the first director of the Alliance to Accelerate Excellence in Education (The Alliance, for short), a grant-funded program aimed at improving college attendance and graduation rates for all students in CSUSM's service region.

And when Jan Jackson retired as the university's first vice president of community engagement, Prado-Olmos stepped away from a classroom role again and into Jackson's shoes in January 2015.

"I knew that Cal State San Marcos had a lot to offer and that we, at the same time, had a lot to learn from communities," she said.

When she assumed the VP position, Prado-Olmos recalled, there were pockets of community engagement across campus that needed to be centralized under one umbrella. That became her charge. Her office took on internships, service learning, community outreach, tribal relations, presidential councils and civic education, among other initiatives.

One of Prado-Olmos' closest colleagues in the division was Sarah Villarreal, who served as her associate VP responsible for community outreach for almost five years. The pair still work together in PAT, with Villarreal being Neufeldt's chief of staff.

"In every context, she has brought an unwavering commitment to social justice and a deep belief in the importance of authentic partnership between the university and the community," Villarreal said. "She reshaped how I think about engagement - not as something we do for a community, but something we build with community. Her emphasis on mutual benefit and shared purpose has had a lasting impact on both my work and perspective."

What, at its core, does it mean for CSUSM to be a community-engaged university?

"I think it means that our students have unique learning opportunities that they can't always find at another institution," Prado-Olmos said. "It means that they're learning a value set and a skill set about how to do things and how to interact with people in partnership that creates a stronger whole. That could not happen without faculty who have the talent to help students translate what they're learning in the classroom to something applied in a variety of community settings, and that's the kind of faculty we bring here because they thrive here."

In retirement, Prado-Olmos wants to spend more time with her family. Her mother is 95. Her son, Martin, is getting married later this year. Her daughter, Ramona, is married with two girls ages 4 and younger.

She also wants to take time to really think about what comes next.

"People ask, 'Well, what do you like to do these days?' " she said. "I don't even know. I like to rest. I enjoy cooking. I enjoy learning. I just don't know what I want to learn next. Maybe how to do retirement well."

But Prado-Olmos has one more year to reflect on it, and one more year to keep community - of every stripe - close to her heart.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

[email protected] | Office: 760-750-7306