In mid-January, Jacob Martinez received some life-changing news that he had to keep secret—until now. 

The Founder and Executive Director of Digital NEST has been chosen as one of five recipients of this year’s The James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award.

The extremely competitive award is given to leaders doing transformative work and have the potential for even greater impact. Past winners have included Elaine Batchlor, CEO and major initiator of South LA’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital; Eric Weaver, founder of Opportunity Fund; and the current surgeon General of California, Nadine Burke Harris (co-winner with Suzy Loftus for their work on the Center for Youth Wellness in San Francisco), and celebrated re-entry and reform activist Susan Burton.

Focused on innovative work that merits expansion, the award is nomination-based, and Martinez was among 10 finalists within the 500-or-so pool of nominees. The finalist round included a site visit, and at the end of the visit with four assessors from the James Irvine Foundation, Martinez told them: 

“I really want this. I want this not for myself, but I want this for the communities that we serve, the youth that we serve, and the future cities that we're going to go into and make an impact.”

The award entails not only a $250,000 prize, but also a huge boost of policy support, advocacy, and channels to promote and bolster the NEST’s work. This month, Martinez attends a reception in Sacramento where he and the other winners will be acknowledged on the senate floor and share their work directly with policymakers.

Digital NEST is at a pivotal moment in its history. Martinez compares it to the end of the NEST’s infancy. Its foundation is strong and healthy, and its model is a proven success. Just five years after opening, Digital NEST is now well-known for doing incredible work and making a huge impact in the Watsonville and Salinas areas. But the vision doesn’t end there.

“We’re planning to go to scale,” he says. “We have done great work here in Watsonville and Salinas, and one of the reasons why we were awarded, I think, is that we’re ready to bring this model to other communities.”

Martinez and his team are expanding to three more Bay Area communities in the next few years; they’re currently narrowing down the list. First, the NEST leadership team identified over 30 communities that could benefit from a NEST, and now they’re slowly talking with communities to determine which locations make the most sense.

Martinez and his team’s intention is to locate in communities that most need local workforce and talent development, but also to encircle Silicon Valley and build a web across the Bay Area.

“We want to use that network that we’ve created with the NEST around the Bay Area to start putting pressure on big tech to look for talent locally,” Martinez says.

He believes that story and message—which he shared enthusiastically with the James Irvine Foundation Award selectors—was catalytic to his winning.

“Everybody talks about it,” Martinez says of the critical lack of diversity in tech and the perceived lack of local tech talent. “Everyone is saying, ‘We can’t find the talent, the pipeline is broken!’ Every day, I come into the NEST and see all these brilliant young, diverse people. The talent is in your community, the talent is in your region.”

Even beyond sustaining and growing the NEST’s programs, Martinez sees this award as a new opportunity to raise his voice as a leader and contribute to a broader conversation around diversity and local talent in tech.

He's asking himself, “Can I become a voice for communities like this across the entire country?” 

Martinez wants to drive this conversation in a big, change-making way by challenging tech companies to ask the questions he and his team ask every day: How do we prepare local young people for jobs in tech? How do we get tech companies to see that talent? And, perhaps most importantly, are companies then creating environments in which that talent can thrive? Do they have mentorship programs? Do they support family life? Do they have diverse leadership?

“That’s a part of the conversation that’s not often talked about,” Martinez says.

And Martinez wants to emphasize that Santa Cruz County should be just as proud of this award as he is. He wants the community to see that Digital NEST’s success and impact is thanks to them—individual supporters, donors, volunteers, advocates, and an active community coming together.

“People ask me all the time, ‘How did you grow so fast?’ It’s the community. They helped me create something that has had an impact.” (70% of NEST funding comes from individuals, and much of that is small donations.)

So it follows in this co-creative model that Martinez sees this as an award not for himself, but for the whole community.

“One of our values at the NEST is that we don’t accept individual awards—I’m really accepting this in honor of the youth and my staff,” Martinez says. “They’re the ones who show up every day and do the work.”