In 2019, I texted my old high school teacher to let her know I’d be in the Valley that week, and asked if I could stop by. By then I had been doing it for four years.

There was no event and nothing on a calendar. I just wanted to see her classroom again, and if there happened to be time, talk to her students for a few minutes.

I was living deeper in the Inland Empire back then, which put the drive at close to two hundred miles each way. I’ve made it more times than I can count since 2015, and I’ve never once regretted the trip.

That’s where Sembrando Flores comes from.

Who we are

Sembrando Flores is a nonprofit organization built on a single idea. Students in medically underserved communities should be able to see themselves in health careers, and they should have a reason to come home once they get there.

In practice, that means bilingual, hands-on health career workshops that we bring directly into high schools. Students don’t sit through a presentation about health care. They pick up the instruments, work through the skills, and talk with professionals who came from communities that look like theirs. For schools that want to go further, those workshops can be built into a longer sequence across a student’s high school years, but the workshops themselves are the heart of what we do.

Who’s behind it

Sembrando Flores was co-founded by Christopher Martija-Flores and Jessica Flores-Martija.

Christopher is a registered dental hygienist, an assistant professor at Loma Linda University School of Dentistry, and a doctoral student in health professions education. He builds the workshops out of the same work he does in academia and in his doctoral research, which is the study of how people actually learn clinical skills.

Jessica is a high school history teacher, and she was raised in Coachella, in the Coachella Valley. She spends her days with students the exact age we serve. She knows what holds a fifteen-year-old’s attention and what loses it inside of two minutes.

That pairing is deliberate. Christopher makes sure the content is rigorous and honest to the professions. Jessica makes sure it actually lands with the students sitting in the room. A workshop can be clinically excellent and still fail if it’s built for the wrong audience, and neither of us was willing to let that happen.

We’re headquartered in Redlands, California, in the Inland Empire, and our pilot is in the Imperial Valley. That distance isn’t an accident. It’s the reason any of this exists.

It started in one classroom

Christopher graduated from the dental assisting program at Southwest High School in El Centro in 2015, out of Mrs. Valadez’s classroom. He left the Valley to build a career in health care. And he started coming back that same year.

Sometimes she asked him to come speak, and he always said yes. Other times he was the one who reached out, letting her know he’d be in town and asking whether she had room for him that week. She always did. That classroom has been open to him since the day he walked out of it as a student, and that’s not a small thing.

The photo above is from 2019, the year he finished his undergraduate degree, four years after finishing her program.

For about a decade, that was the entire operation. No organization, no budget, no name. One graduate, one classroom, and a teacher who kept making room.

Why we formalized it

Ten years of visits built trust. What they couldn’t build was reach, or timing.

Christopher was usually talking with students in their final year of high school. For a student who has already found their direction, that conversation is encouragement. For a student who has never been shown what else exists, senior year can be a hard place to begin exploring. There isn’t much runway left to take a different course, find a mentor, or change a plan.

There’s a deeper version of that problem, too, and it’s the one that really drives this work.

When Christopher was in high school in the Imperial Valley, health care meant three things. Doctor, dentist, or nurse. That was the whole menu, and it wasn’t unusual. In a Health Professional Shortage Area, students have limited contact with the professions themselves, so the field narrows down to whatever they’ve personally seen.

Health care is so much bigger than that. Dental hygiene and dental assisting. Respiratory therapy. Diagnostic medical sonography. Radiologic technology. Phlebotomy and medical laboratory science. Surgical technology. Medical assisting. Pharmacy technology. Emergency medical services and paramedicine. Public health and health education. Nutrition and dietetics. Physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech-language pathology. Health information management. Behavioral and mental health. Dozens more beyond that.

Some of those are reached through a certificate program. Others through an associate’s degree, a bachelor’s, a master’s, or a doctorate. Some let a student start working within a year of leaving high school. Others take a decade. All of them are real, and all of them are needed in communities like this one.

Almost none of that reaches a student who has never met someone doing the work.

That gap is what Sembrando Flores exists to close. We’re not trying to tell students what to become. We’re trying to make sure they know what’s out there, understand the routes that lead to it, and have someone in their corner while they figure it out.

A few questions worth answering

Why did you keep driving back?

Because I knew what it meant. When I was a student in that room, people who had graduated came back and talked to us, and hearing it from someone who sat in the same chair is a completely different experience than reading it in a brochure.

Mrs. Valadez invited me plenty of times, and I always said yes. Other times I was the one asking, and she always found room for me. It was never a burden either way. I went because I wanted to.

What does “come back home” actually mean?

It isn’t about how far we reach. It’s about home.

What I want is for a student to finish high school, pursue a health career, and then turn around and do this for the group behind them. Coming home doesn’t have to mean moving back. It means making an impact in the community that raised you, however that looks. Volunteering at an event. Presenting to a class. Stopping by when you’re in town, the way I did.

Growing up in the Imperial Valley can be isolating. You grow up inside one specific set of experiences that people outside of it don’t share, and that can be a lonely thing to carry. I don’t think that’s unique to the Valley, either. I’d guess students in inner city neighborhoods and small towns across the country would tell you something similar. Part of what we’re building is the sense that you belong to something, and that it’s still there when you’re ready to come back to it.

What do you want a student to walk away with?

Opportunities I didn’t have. Exposure early enough that they can act on it. Mentorship that outlasts a single visit. A real understanding of the routes into this field, not just the three jobs everybody’s heard of. And a way to give back to their own community while they’re still in high school, not only after they graduate.

What comes next

We’ve already been on the ground in the Imperial Valley this year, working alongside community partners and the students who inspired this organization in the first place. There’s a lot we haven’t talked about yet, and those stories are coming over the next few weeks.

We’re not in a rush to grow. Students in the Imperial Valley first, then other underserved communities, then other counties and cities across California, and eventually further than that.

The work is small right now. It’s also real, and we’re not slowing down.