Kids Unlimited founder and former student reflect on more than 25 years of serving children in need

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.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. When Tom Cole moved to Southern Oregon in 1995, his plan was to open a regional chapter of Big Brothers, Big Sisters. But when he came to Medford, he found that there was a different need. He saw many low income families, households where English wasn’t spoken and lots of kids who were not getting the educational supports they needed. So he changed course.

In 1998, Cole piloted an after-school program at one school, serving 50 students with a $500 grant. More than 25 years later, the Kids Unlimited nonprofit has an annual budget of more than $13 million and runs its own charter school, along with pre-K, after-school and summer camp programs throughout the Medford School District.

Lupita Vargas was a kindergartner who did not speak English when she started in that very first Kids Unlimited after-school program. She went on to go to college, win the Fulbright and get a master’s degree. She’s currently the director of educational services for this nonprofit. She and Tom Cole join us now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.

Tom Cole: Thanks for having us.

Lupita Vargas: Yeah. Thank you for having us.

Miller: Lupita, first – As I noted, you were part of that first pilot after-school program when you were a kindergartner. What was school like for you in those days?

Vargas: Yeah. What was school, right? It was a whole new experience because I didn’t have any pre-K experience either. So, when I walked in, I definitely remember feeling overwhelmed in the sense of just the language, and it’s a whole new culture. My parents are Mexican, so coming into a space where everything is new was a bit overwhelming. I would say that’s what I remember about walking into kindergarten: just feeling overwhelmed.

Miller: Do you know what made your mom decide to enroll you and your older brother at that point in this program?

Vargas: I believe Tom reached out to my older brother and said, “hey, there’s this after-school program,” and then connected with my mom. And my mom is very strong-willed, knows that she wanted her kids to be successful. [She] just didn’t really have the means or the knowledge but knew that, if I connected them to someone, that they will be fine. I’ll do everything else.

So she had a conversation with Tom and with other parents that were wanting a space where kids can get help with their homework. And she knew that we needed that academic support. We needed a safe space to stay because my mom and dad would work until 5:30; school gets out at 2:30. So she didn’t want to leave my brother and I at home alone. She was really looking for what kind of options she had based on her income as well.

Miller: Tom, what do you remember about those early conversations with families, where I imagine you had to get buy-in?

Cole: Yeah. The community at that time was changing. I was an outsider. I had moved to actually start Boys & Girls Clubs in the area … and recognize that, like a lot of communities that were changing in Oregon at that time in the late ‘90s, [it was] a rural community that had maybe certain perceptions about diversity and there were obviously barriers at that time. The schools [had] zero translation capacity. Inclusion was certainly not something that was a goal of the institutions at that time. So, at that time, it was really about providing hope – a message of hope, of, we believed that we could be a resource, working cooperatively with families. And it was building trust in those early years, that what we were doing is something that could be meaningful later.

Miller: Lupita, if you think back to that after-school program, is there an image that comes to your mind most often now?

Vargas: I wanna say the image that I remember most was just being seen and heard by staff members that just wanted us to have fun while we were learning. I remember a big smile from Edgar and Tanny. Edgar was bilingual. Tanny tried to speak some Spanish, but there were staff members there with big hearts that were willing to put in the time to really mentor us, listen to us and help us.

Miller: And it’s interesting, even if he didn’t speak Spanish, he tried. But you knew that he was there for you.

Vargas: Yes. It was very much this feeling of building relationships. Back then, dodgeball was super popular. I remember there’s like this image that I have of, we were playing staff versus students and there was a point where the dodgeball just came a little harder on the leg. And my mom walks in and she goes, “you did something, what happened?” And it was this conversation where they both just started laughing because there was a time where they understood like, hey, we knew it wasn’t intentional; it’s just a game, it’s competitive, you’re teaching them the rules and how it goes. So there was just a lot of opportunity for us to connect with people. I think that’s what I’m so humbled to do now and be that person for the students that we serve today.

Miller: Is dodgeball still popular?

Vargas: You know, dodgeball is not as popular, but I’ll tell you tag with two fingers is what we see nowadays. And the kids are super into it or just playing octopus tag with different materials. But yeah, we find ways in which we could still have some healthy competition between students.

Cole: I think dodgeball was canceled, last five years.

Miller: Yeah, understandably. It was always terrifying and then mixed in with a few moments of excitement.

Lupita, maybe it’s a gigantic question just to boil down, because my understanding is you took part in various versions of Kids Unlimited programs for a while. But when you distill it, what impact do you think it had on the rest of your life?

Vargas: Well, I mean, it’s been the seed that just kept on blooming, right? I think it’s one of the things that when I look back into what made me go into education, it goes back to Kids Unlimited. It goes back to, I was someone and I could see my peers struggling to really receive the academic support, or the emotional support, or you name it, in order to really thrive. Where, I will say like the traditional school provided some support, but it wasn’t enough. There was enough gaps where I saw a lot of my peers fall through the crack.

So when I think about Kids Unlimited in all of its evolution – I was part of their summer program, being a camp counselor and teaching French or Spanish. And then I would come back and was part of the initiative to recruit students and families to the first charter school, because I really truly believe that we go out of our way to ensure students are successful in meeting families where they’re at.

Miller: Tom, the origin story of Kids Unlimited is that, in a sense, you pivoted from that, “I’m gonna come in and create a Boys & Girls Club chapter,” because you wanted to provide services that met local needs instead of, I don’t know, sort of dropping down a pre-existing national model. That’s sort of how I read it. How do you keep doing that? Keep seeing with clear eyes what local needs are, when you become an established organization that is used to doing things in a certain way?

Cole: I think the organic nature of creating based on need – listening to our kids, understanding what gaps there were and not not trying to replicate, let’s say a cookie cutter model of, it works in Tacoma, it works in Portland, it works in St. Louis. So it has kind of a consistency to it. And that’s not really what community looks like; communities are so different. Medford was so different in 1998 than it is in 2024.

It’s funny, the brand of the Unlimited is the challenge of always listening and finding out what resonates with kids, what kind of cultural connections can be made to develop programs. I mean, we’re launching a pasta company right now that’s making organic pasta. We’ve evolved sports programs, music programs and theaters. Constantly trying to listen and be creative about how to use contemporary culture as a means for educating our children. It doesn’t give us boundaries that restrict us to following a particular path. And obviously, we’ve learned to discard certain things. And the things that have resonated the most, to institutionalize them as part of what makes Kids Unlimited as fabric today.

Miller: What do you see as the biggest changes in the needs of the community in the 25-plus years that you’ve been operating?

Cole: You know, the thing that we struggle with – and it piggybacks on your prior guest – is the landscape, the cultural landscape of society has changed so drastically in a short period of time that, comparatively, even with Lupita as a kindergartener to now as someone who’s in a step … the climate of what technology has done in obviously infusing different qualities of learning, means and prioritization of how families spend or don’t spend time together. There’s so many things that weigh into the climate, as a result of … the internet in 1998 was very much in an infancy stage here. And to see the consumption of social media. All of those kind of things have really, really changed socialization and that is something that we are constantly challenged by.

Miller: Lupita, how does having been a kid at Kids Unlimited inform the way you do your job today?

Vargas: That’s a great question. I think a lot about our parents, right? So coming from a family who have a language barrier, whenever I meet with families, it’s always coming with this place of wanting to know more and what can I do to support them? So I tell them my story when sometimes they feel frustrated or they don’t understand what’s going on, and letting them know like, “Hey, there’s different stages. I was a kid here. I was able to receive the support, the network and the mentors needed to be successful.”

Like it just takes a team, it takes a village. It’s our community that we’re building. So it’s really special. I would say I hold it in every conversation that I have, whether it’s with the student, whether it’s staff members or families. I think about what those interactions mean.

Miller: What might you have heard from one of those families that would lead you to say, hey, I understand it can be hard? I’m curious [about] the concerns that you’re likely to hear these days from those families that you’re trying to help?

Vargas: I would say we have about 15 newcomers – so they’re students that come from a country that do not speak English. For those families in particular, a lot of them are struggling with, do I just have them focus on English? Like should I not even practice Spanish at home? And I use my story to say, “Hey, I just spoke Spanish at home. I didn’t learn English until I was in kindergarten and I was in the ELL [English Language Learner] program.” So really much letting them know success looks different. And right now, they’re going to be successful being bilingual once they’re able to get that acquisition in English.

So it’s really empathizing and understanding where their concerns are coming from. Because I can recall my mom having similar sentiments in terms of like, I see them really struggling with English. But knowing that, hey, it’s part of the process, you have to trust that they’re learning and they’re making gains. We can’t see a change overnight, right? It’s gonna take time.

Miller: Tom, I had not realized that you were getting into the pasta business, but it seems like before that, starting your own charter school was both, I imagine, a very big lift and a very different strategy than various kinds of after-school or sort of buttressing programs. Why start your own school?

Cole: Well, we had seen so many kids that we were mentoring, that were growing up in our program, that were breaking the kind of cycles of poverty and defying the odds of what graduation rates were with Latino kids in this community, in the early 2000s and mid 2000s. And we were also watching some really disturbing data trends around suspension and expulsion that were disproportionately representing many of the communities that we had priorities in serving, specifically the Latino community.

And we didn’t understand. Then we started to really do investigation of like, well, OK, why is this kid being suspended all the time? And we started kind of fast forwarding data and going, all right, if you suspend a kid for 34 days in their eighth grade year, the likelihood that they finished ninth grade is pretty low because they have missed so much. And they’re already behind in so many other ways socially.

So we were really frustrated by watching this. And we kind of went on this exploratory thing because we said, there are communities in this country that have done an exceptional job of defying the odds, working in low income communities. The Harlem Children’s Zone was one of the models we visited. We went to Atlanta to look at a Purpose Built Community, Drew Charter School. Again, different communities, different minority communities. We went to San Diego to look at efforts. We were like, despite all of the similar challenges, there are successes and we felt like we had a responsibility to do something that really reflected a higher commitment to doing things differently, honestly.

We knew what had been our recipes for success. And the truth is, it’s relationship. It’s a longevity of relationship that is bound with a commitment, mutually by parents. So it’s learning and being inclusive in their success. That was really the launch – it was both the stress of watching kids falling through the cracks at rates that were unacceptable and it was also the belief that we could do something better.

Miller: Has it come to pass?

Cole: It has. I mean, our scores now, when we look at regionally with … we’re now 12-plus years into this campaign. We have students now that are at Hofstra. We have students that are in Stanford, who were kids who came from communities where their parents had barriers – whether those were citizenship barriers, language barriers or just barriers of poverty – that did not see college or did not see meaningful career options. And to see them now, being in that class of graduates that are now in college and representing success has been super inspiring.

And looking at data, watching the number of kids … our school was one of the most diverse single schools in the state under one roof. We have a 67% ELL population, about 86% of our students are Latino. We’ve done things differently. We cook our own foods. We really took pride in building a nutrition system, recognizing that our kids were dependent upon our food and they spend more time with us than they do at home. So having something that was cooked from scratch and healthy [for] breakfast, lunch and dinner. So all those components have really reinforced the mission and the purpose.

Miller: Lupita just in the 30 seconds we have left, what does success look like to you for your kids?

Vargas: Success looks like breaking barriers, right? Ensuring that our kids feel empowered to know that if they set their mind to certain goals, whether that’s trade school, whether that’s learning how to read by a certain age or grade level, that they have the support. So it’s just really that empowerment for them.

Miller: Lupita Vargas and Tom Cole, thanks very much.

Cole: Thank you

Miller: Tom Cole is the founder of Kids Unlimited. Lupita Vargas is a director of educational services for the Medford-based nonprofit.

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