Two decades in the work, now passing it on.
I’m Hector Cuevas, a senior program and operations leader who spent about twenty years building and running youth and community programs across New York City. I started at the bottom, a teenager in a summer youth job, and worked my way up to leading multi-site operations and multimillion-dollar budgets.
Now I share what that taught me out in the open: leadership, career and finances, through free tools, writing, and a YouTube channel on the way. And I teach teams the same way I learned it: in half-day workshops built on the work itself, not a slide deck.
Crain’s New York Business 40 Under 40 · 2025
Bronx, NYC
Where this experience comes from.
Every workshop and system I offer traces back to a role where I had to make it work, with real staff, real funders, and real young people counting on it.
Citywide program & operations leadership
Senior leadership · 20+ sites
Set the strategic vision for youth and community programming across a large, multi-site citywide portfolio: Beacon, Cornerstone, community-school, and youth-development programs.
- Built and managed multimillion-dollar public and private budgets across a portfolio of contracts.
- Led managers and frontline teams across many sites; coached site leaders on budgets and operations.
- Launched partnerships that expanded access to free, industry-recognized learning for older youth.
- Grew programming and helped bring in significant new public funding for community-safety work.
Multi-site program leadership
Director-level · 12+ sites
Led program quality across more than a dozen sites and a portfolio of public and private contracts.
- Kept programs audit-ready and in strong standing with city youth-agency funders.
- Moved every program to remote delivery within weeks in 2020, keeping services running through the pandemic.
- Built benchmarking and evaluation approaches to measure and improve program performance.
Program systems & compliance leadership
Senior management role
Oversaw a portfolio of city, state, and federal contracts and the systems that kept them compliant.
- Built the onboarding, compliance, benchmarking, and budgeting systems that programs run on.
- Presented as a facilitator at a national youth-development conference.
Community center leadership
Beacon community-center model
Ran the day-to-day operations of a Beacon community center, supervising and developing a full site team against program goals and outcomes.
After-school program leadership
Middle-school after-school
Recruited, trained, and developed frontline staff and partnered with school leadership to design programming around students’ and families’ needs.
From running programs to teaching teams.
Everything in the workshops and the videos started as a problem I had to solve on the job, not an idea I picked up secondhand.
Leadership, management, systems, operations: none of it came to me from a textbook. I learned it running youth programs across New York City, where the plan had to meet payroll, funders wanted receipts, and a building full of young people needed the doors open on time.
So when I talk about supervising people who used to be your peers, or getting an operation out of your head and into systems a team can run without you, I’m not repeating a framework I read. I’m handing you something I built, broke, fixed, and ran for years, and I remember what each version cost to get right.
I’m not teaching theory. I’m teaching what I did, and what it cost.
That’s the whole reason this site exists. I’d rather hand you the shortcut than watch you learn it the slow way, so I’m putting what worked, what didn’t, and what I’d do differently out where anyone can use it, in plain English, and in the room when a team wants to go deeper.
Education, licenses & memberships.
The formal grounding behind the practical work, and the licenses that keep youth programs compliant.
Education
- MS, Organizational Leadership
CUNY Lehman College - BA, Business Management & Administration
CUNY City College of New York
Certifications & Memberships
- Leadership Fellows NY Alum, Executive Certificate in Nonprofit Leadership
- NYC Open Data Week, panelist on community-safety program impact
- UConn, Family Development Credential
- Community Research Exchange, High Performing Managers Initiative
Licenses & Certificates
- NYS OCFS, School-Age Child Care (SACC) License Holder
- NYS OCFS, Summer Camp Permit Holder
- Trauma-Informed Care
- Child Abuse & Mandated Reporter
- Basic Life Support Pro & First Aid
- 15 Hours, Foundations in Health & Safety
The same work, with your team.
Everything above is where the half-days come from: the same systems, run with the people you actually have, in your own building. Your team leaves with the tools, not a reading list.
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