Tom Cole moved to Southern Oregon in 1995 with the thought of starting a new regional chapter of Big Brothers, Big Sisters. Instead, what he saw around Medford made him realize the community was full of families whose children weren’t getting the educational support they needed, many of them low-income and from households that didn’t speak English.

In 1998, Cole piloted an after-school program at one school, serving 50 students with a $500 grant. Since then, his efforts have turned into a full-fledged nonprofit called Kids Unlimited, which operates in nearly every public school in the Medford School District. In 2013 the organization launched the Kids Unlimited Academy, a charter school for underserved communities.

Lupita Vargas was in kindergarten when she started in that first Kids Unlimited after-school program. At that time no one in her family spoke English, she says, and the tutoring and other support that the program provided to her and her three siblings was life changing. Vargas joins us, along with founder Tom Cole, to tell us more about her family’s experience, and talk about her job now as the nonprofit’s director of educational services.