Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Lucero.
Hi Michael, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
My name is Michael Lucero, and my story is one that I never imagined I would be able to tell from the position I am in today.
I grew up in San Diego, but my childhood was far from stable. I moved between family members, foster homes, group homes, and juvenile institutions. At a young age, I learned how to survive, but I didn’t necessarily learn how to succeed. The people, circumstances, and environments around me shaped many of the decisions I would eventually make.
By the time I was a teenager, I had become deeply involved in the justice system. My path eventually led me to the California Youth Authority and later into the California Department of Corrections. In my twenties, I received a 17-year sentence and ultimately served 16 years.
For a long time, my identity was defined by my mistakes, my incarceration, and the expectations people had for someone with my background. But somewhere along the way, I began to understand something that would completely change the direction of my life: **my past could either be the thing that defined me or the thing that prepared me to help someone else.**
When I came home, I had to learn how to live differently. Reentry isn’t simply walking out of a prison gate. It’s rebuilding relationships, learning how to navigate a world that has changed, finding employment, dealing with the consequences of your past, and figuring out who you are when the system no longer tells you who you are supposed to be.
I was fortunate to encounter people and opportunities that allowed me to begin building something different. Over time, I became increasingly involved in work supporting people impacted by incarceration, gangs, and the justice system. I discovered that my lived experience wasn’t something I needed to hide. It could actually become one of my greatest tools.
That realization eventually brought me to **Rise Up Industries (RUI)**.
Today, I oversee the Prevention side of Rise Up Industries, including **Rise Up Leadership Academy (RULA)**. Our work is focused on young people—many of whom are growing up in circumstances that can look remarkably similar to some of the environments I experienced myself.
That connection is not lost on me.
RULA works with students beginning as early as fifth grade and continues supporting them through high school. We provide mentorship, academic support, leadership development, recreation, life-skills programming, case management, and opportunities for young people to discover interests and strengths they may not have known they possessed.
Our goal isn’t simply to keep kids busy after school.
**Our goal is to interrupt a trajectory.**
I know what it feels like when the adults around you don’t necessarily understand what is happening beneath the surface. I know what it feels like to be labeled by your behavior rather than understood for the circumstances contributing to it. And I know how powerful it can be when even one person decides that you are worth investing in.
That is what I want our young people to experience.
I often tell people that prevention is not about predicting which child is going to make a bad decision. It is about making sure that a young person has enough positive relationships, opportunities, structure, accountability, and hope that they have other choices available when life gets difficult.
That philosophy has become central to the work I do today.
One of the things I value most about Rise Up Industries is that we don’t ask people to forget where they came from. We believe that lived experience matters. Whether we are working with a young person who is struggling in school or an adult returning home from incarceration, we understand that people are more than the worst thing they have ever done or the challenges they are currently facing.
My own journey has taught me that transformation rarely happens because somebody simply tells you to change.
It happens through relationships.
It happens when someone believes in you before you fully believe in yourself.
It happens when someone gives you an opportunity and then holds you accountable for what you do with it.
And sometimes, it happens when somebody who has walked through the same darkness can sit across from you and say, *I understand—and there is another way.*
That is the perspective I bring into my work every day.
Today, I have the privilege of overseeing prevention programming and working alongside a team that is committed to creating opportunities for young people in San Diego. I get to sit in rooms with educators, community partners, parents, staff, and young people and work toward something I once never thought would be part of my life: helping build a future for others.
I don’t take that responsibility lightly.
There are days when I look at the young people we serve and recognize pieces of my younger self in them. That can be difficult, but it is also motivating. I know that not every story will have the same ending as mine. I also know that we cannot wait until a young person is deeply involved in the justice system before we decide they deserve support.
By then, we may have already missed years of opportunities.
**Prevention means showing up earlier.**
It means creating safe spaces. It means providing mentorship. It means helping a student with homework, encouraging them to try something new, taking them into the community, teaching them leadership, allowing them to fail safely, and helping them get back up. Sometimes it means having a difficult conversation. Sometimes it means simply being the adult who consistently shows up.
And sometimes, it means giving a young person a glimpse of a life they haven’t yet imagined for themselves.
That is why the work I do today feels so personal.
I didn’t take a traditional path to leadership. I didn’t arrive here with a perfect résumé or a straight line of accomplishments. My education came from some very difficult places. Prison taught me things I never wanted to learn, but life after prison taught me that those experiences could be transformed into something meaningful.
I can’t change what happened when I was younger.
I can’t give back the years I spent incarcerated.
But I can decide what I do with the years I have now.
For me, that means investing in young people. It means helping create opportunities before a young person becomes another statistic. It means working with families and communities rather than simply reacting when something goes wrong. And it means continuing to prove that people can change, organizations can change, and communities can change.
When I think about where I started and where I am today, I don’t see a perfect success story.
I see a **second chance that became a responsibility**.
My journey from a child moving through foster homes and institutions, to someone who spent years incarcerated, to someone now helping lead prevention efforts in the same community where I grew up, is a reminder that our beginnings don’t have to determine our endings.
And perhaps most importantly, I believe young people deserve to hear that message **before** they have to learn it the hard way.
That is why I continue to rise up.
Not because my past disappeared, but because I finally learned how to use it for something greater than myself.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
No, it definitely hasn’t been a smooth road. In fact, there were times when I wasn’t sure I would ever get to the place I am today.
One of the hardest parts was learning how to rebuild my life after spending 16 years incarcerated. I came home to a world that had changed significantly, and I had changed as well. Technology, relationships, employment, and even the way people communicated had evolved. I had to learn how to navigate all of that while also carrying the weight of my past.
There were doors that didn’t open because of my record. There were people who didn’t know what to make of my background. And, honestly, there were times when I didn’t know what to make of myself either. When you spend so much of your life being defined by a system, it takes time to develop a new identity outside of that system.
Another struggle was rebuilding relationships. I had missed important years of people’s lives, and I couldn’t expect everything to go back to normal simply because I was home. Trust had to be rebuilt, and that takes time. I had to learn that saying I had changed wasn’t enough. I had to demonstrate it through my actions consistently.
There were also plenty of moments when my past caught up with me emotionally. It’s easy to look at where I am today and see the position, the work, and the accomplishments. What people don’t always see are the years of mistakes, consequences, setbacks, and self-doubt that came before them.
Even as I moved forward professionally, I had to learn how to lead. I went from trying to rebuild my own life to eventually being responsible for helping guide others. That came with its own challenges. I had to learn how to communicate, manage people, make difficult decisions, accept criticism, and recognize that my way isn’t always the only way.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that progress isn’t always a straight line. There have been setbacks, disappointments, and moments where I’ve questioned whether I was doing enough. But I have learned not to let one difficult day convince me that the entire journey isn’t working.
What helped me most was having people who were willing to see more in me than my past. They gave me opportunities, but they also held me accountable. I think both are necessary. People need someone to believe in them, but they also need someone willing to tell them the truth and challenge them to become better.
That’s a big part of why the work I do today is so meaningful to me.
I know what it feels like to struggle. I know what it feels like to be judged by your past. And I know how powerful it can be when someone decides that your story isn’t finished yet.
So no, it hasn’t been a smooth road.
But looking back, I’m grateful for the road—not because I would choose to repeat the difficult parts, but because those experiences have given me an understanding of resilience, accountability, and second chances that I carry with me into the work I do today.
The struggles didn’t disappear. I just learned how to turn them into something useful.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Today, my work is centered around something that has become deeply personal to me: prevention, opportunity, and helping people see a different future for themselves.
I work with Rise Up Industries (RUI) in San Diego, where I oversee our Prevention programming. A major part of that work is Rise Up Leadership Academy (RULA), which serves young people beginning in fifth grade and supports them through high school graduation.
Our goal is to reach young people before they become deeply involved in the justice system. We provide mentorship, academic support, leadership development, recreation, life-skills, case management, and opportunities for young people to discover their strengths. We work with schools, families, community partners, and, most importantly, the young people themselves.
I specialize in working with individuals and communities impacted by circumstances that can create barriers to success—whether that’s justice-system involvement, gang influence, unstable environments, or simply a lack of positive opportunities and consistent support.
But I think what I am really known for is being able to connect with people because I have lived some of what they are experiencing.
I don’t walk into a room pretending to have all the answers. I walk in understanding what it feels like to be judged, to make mistakes, to have people lose hope in you, and to wonder whether you can actually change the direction of your life.
That lived experience has become one of the most valuable tools I bring to my work.
What I’m most proud of isn’t a particular title or accomplishment. It’s seeing a young person who may have struggled with school, behavior, confidence, or relationships begin to believe that they can do something different. It’s watching a student discover that they’re good at something. It’s seeing a young person take on leadership. It’s having a kid come back and tell you about something they accomplished.
Those moments mean more to me than any award ever could.
I’m also proud of the fact that I have been able to take experiences that once seemed like nothing but loss and turn them into something that can benefit other people. I spent many years incarcerated. Today, I have the opportunity to help prevent another young person from taking that same path.
That’s not lost on me.
What sets me apart is that I don’t separate my professional work from my lived experience. My past isn’t something I try to hide from the people I serve. It’s part of why I care so deeply about the work.
At the same time, I don’t believe lived experience alone is enough. You have to continue learning, listening, developing professionally, and being willing to recognize when you don’t have the answer. Leadership, to me, means being willing to grow alongside the people you’re trying to help.
I also believe strongly in meeting people where they are—not where we wish they were.
If we want to help young people make different choices, we have to understand the environments, relationships, pressures, and experiences influencing those choices. We can’t simply tell someone to “do better” without helping create the conditions and opportunities that make doing better possible.
That’s what I try to bring to Rise Up Industries.
I understand the consequences of waiting too long to intervene. That’s why I believe so strongly in prevention.
I’m proud to now be in a position where I can help build programs, support staff, work with schools and families, and create opportunities for young people that I didn’t always have growing up.
My story started in places where many people would have assumed the ending was already written for me.
Today, I get to help young people understand that their ending hasn’t been written yet either.
And honestly, that’s probably the part of my work I’m most proud of.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
I think the next 5–10 years are going to bring a major shift in how we think about prevention. For a long time, prevention has sometimes been treated as something we do after a problem becomes visible. I believe the future is going to require us to get much more intentional about intervening earlier and building strong protective factors around young people before they become deeply involved in the systems we are ultimately trying to keep them out of.
We’re already seeing greater recognition of the importance of mentoring, after-school programming, school connectedness, positive adult relationships, leadership development, and safe community environments.
For me, the exciting part is figuring out how we take what we are building at Rise Up Industries and make it sustainable and replicable.
I don’t want Rise Up Leadership Academy to simply become a larger program. I want us to develop a model that can be replicated in other schools, neighborhoods, and eventually other communities.
That means getting very intentional about what we do.
What are the essential components of our program? What makes the relationships work? How do we train staff? How do we measure whether a young person is actually progressing? How do we engage families and schools? How do we incorporate lived experience? How do we maintain quality when we grow?
Those are the questions I think we need to be answering now.
I believe the future of prevention is going to be much more collaborative. Schools can’t do it alone. Families can’t do it alone. Community organizations can’t do it alone. Law enforcement can’t do it alone. Mental health providers can’t do it alone. We need systems that communicate with each other and understand that a young person exists in all of those environments at the same time.
Our job should be to build a network around that young person rather than continuing to operate in separate silos.
I also think we’re going to become much better at using data. Not just collecting numbers because a grant requires them, but actually using information to understand what is working, who we’re reaching, where we’re falling short, and what changes we need to make. Prevention needs to be both relationship-driven and data-informed.
At the same time, I don’t want us to lose the human side of the work.
That’s probably one of my biggest concerns as programs grow. You can create a great curriculum, a great database, and a great organizational structure, but none of those things replace a trusted adult who knows a young person’s name, understands what they’re going through, and keeps showing up.
That is where I believe our lived-experience model can be particularly powerful.
I think we’re going to see more organizations recognize that people who have personally experienced the challenges they’re helping others navigate bring something unique to the table. My own experience with the justice system doesn’t make me an expert in everything, but it gives me a perspective that can’t be learned from a textbook.
I believe the same is true for the young people we serve. They should not just be recipients of prevention services. They should eventually become leaders, mentors, advocates, and voices in designing those services.
Looking 5–10 years ahead, my vision is for Rise Up Leadership Academy to have a clearly defined model that can be implemented across multiple school clusters and communities, while still being flexible enough to respond to the needs of each neighborhood.
I would love to see a young person enter the program in fifth grade and have a consistent pathway all the way through high school—academics, mentorship, leadership, career exposure, recreation, life skills, community involvement, and eventually employment or higher education.
And I would love to see that same model working in communities beyond San Diego.
For me, scaling isn’t about serving the most kids possible. It’s about being able to serve more kids without losing what makes the program meaningful in the first place.
If we can build something that is effective, measurable, culturally responsive, relationship-based, and teachable to other organizations and communities, then we have the potential to do much more than operate a successful program.
We can create a blueprint.
That’s where I see the industry going—and that’s where I hope my work at Rise Up Industries can help lead it.
The ultimate goal is simple: don’t wait for young people to become part of the problem before we invest in them. Build enough opportunity, connection, accountability, and hope around them early enough that they have a different path to choose.
And if we can prove that model works, I want to help take it beyond the walls of Rise Up Industries and make it something other communities can use too.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://riseupindustries.org/rula/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rula_riseupleadershipacademy
- Other: https://vimeo.com/1121816206?fl=pl&fe=sh
