A Lifetime of Showing Up
Featured Story
After four decades of service — and four tries at retirement — Cindy Padilla is stepping away from United Way Northern New Mexico. We owe her more than we can say. But we can try.
Cindy Padilla has failed at retirement four times.
Cindy Padilla
She'll tell you so herself, laughing — “MaybeI'll take that on as my next career,” she says, and somewhere in that laugh is everything you need to know about her. Some people serve because it's their job. Cindy serves because she doesn't know another way to be in the world.
This summer, as she hands the leadership of United Way Northern New Mexico to Donna Milanovich, she's trying retirement a fifth time. Those of us who know her aren't placing bets. But if anyone has earned every quiet morning ahead, it's her.
She knew in high school what she wanted: a life of service. She earned a degree in social work, and when those jobs were scarce, she found another door in — local government, starting with Keep Santa Fe Beautiful. Different name, same calling. “Public service, community service, individual service — they're all definitely aligned,” she says.
Picture her in the job that shaped everything after: a young woman, newly in charge of the City of Santa Fe's solid waste department, standing in front of thirty men who hauled the city's trash for a living. She made them a deal — she'd work to earn their respect, and she expected the same. And then she told them what she believed about their work. If the mayor doesn't show up for a day, nobody notices. Three, four, five days — eventually someone asks. But if the sanitation crews don't show up for one morning, the whole city wants to know what happened.
“It's all about serving the public,” she told them. “It's not about us.” She has spent forty years proving she meant it.
Cindy at Obama Innauguration
The career that followed carried her a long way from that sanitation yard — protecting New Mexico's water, serving in the Governor's cabinet as Secretary of Aging and Long-Term Services, and finally to Washington, D.C., appointed by President Obama to the Administration on Aging. She worked at every altitude public service has to offer. And at every one of them, she saw the same heartbreak: good people, good programs, working alone. “We don't connect the dots very well,” she says. The question followed her all the way home to Northern New Mexico: what if somebody did?
When she took the helm of the United Way in 2019, Cindy didn't arrive with a grand plan to fix things. Instead, she was grateful to board chair Liddie Martinez for the opportunity and approached the role with a simple question: 'What can I learn?' She already held a core belief that nonprofit organizations, from local libraries to community centers in places like Ojo Sarco and Embudo Valley, are the true backbone and heartbeat of Northern New Mexico.
Then the pandemic hit, months into the job. Her answer was the answer of her whole life: connection. Through 2020, she kept the region's nonprofits in one room, even when the room was a screen of Zoom squares, so that no organization faced the crisis alone. And when food insecurity swept the region, the collaboration she'd been quietly tending showed what it was for. Organizations that had never worked together filled food boxes side by side and tucked into every bag, a directory of food services. Help that arrived carrying directions to more help. That was Cindy's fingerprint, exactly.
“No one person can do it alone.”
Then she retired. And here is where her story stops being a career and becomes something closer to a love letter.
She went home because her mother and father needed her, the most human reason there is. Some callings don't retire; caring for the people who raised you is one of them. She meant to stay gone.
But the phone rang. “What brought me back was Liddie,” she says simply. The organization had had a tough year, and it needed help. Her parents still needed her too, so she said yes the only way she could, part-time, carrying both. She came back not for a title or a salary, but because an institution she loved was stumbling and a friend asked. “I believe that united, working together collaboratively, is the only way to make a difference,” she says. “No one person can do it alone.” She has never once exempted herself from that sentence.
Cindy with Kristen Trujillo (San de Porres Soup Kitchen) and Diego Lopez (Hands Across Cultures)
You have felt her work, even if you never met her. If a young person in Española found a mentor, a stage, or a first glimpse of their own future at the Pathfinder Casita, that's her. If you watched teenagers run the room at February's candidate forum, drafting the questions and holding the microphone while the adults answered, “I was really proud of our youth stepping up for that,” that's her, standing in the back, beaming. If a food bag ever arrived at your door with a phone number tucked inside, or if the nonprofits you love now answer each other's calls instead of struggling alone, that's the quiet architecture Cindy built, dot by connected dot.
Cindy presents check to LA Cares
And if you ever did meet her at a UNITE meeting, a check presentation, a folding table stacked with food bags, you know the other thing about Cindy: she thanked you first. Nonprofit directors and first-year staff, longtime donors and first-time volunteers, the resident who just stopped by with a question, everyone who crossed her path walked away feeling that their contribution to this community mattered, and that she was genuinely glad to be in the room with them. And anyone who ever watched her address a room full of nonprofit leaders has seen what happened next: she'd get partway into telling them what they mean to this region, the backbone, the heartbeat, and her voice would catch. She never apologized for it. Some truths deserve to be delivered with a full heart.
Cindy, San Martin de Porres and volunteers at 2024 Food Distribution
Ask her what she's proudest of and she'll deflect, gently, every time. “I don't really look at my work as about me. I'm thankful that I had an opportunity to work with a lot of incredible people to make things happen.” The philosophy underneath it all she credits to the people she served alongside, like the partners at Inside Out, whose way of meeting people distilled her whole mission into one sentence she loves to repeat: “Hey, my brother, how can I help you?”
This time, leaving feels different and she can tell you exactly why. “I have confidence in the team,” she says, “and I know that I'm leaving a team, not just one person or two people.” What was once a couple of people juggling everything is now a family of staff, programs, and partners. And in Donna, she sees what she needs to see: someone who came to participate in a grants review and fell all the way in love with the nonprofits of this region, the need and the value of their work at once. “I believe in her. I believe that she'll be able to continue to move our organization forward.”
What she asks us to protect is the thing she spent her whole life building toward: “We amplify an individual voice to an organization voice to a network voice.” One person's story, carried by an organization, carried by a network, until somebody with the power to change things finally hears it. That's not a program. That's a belief system and she's leaving it in all of our hands.
There's a quiet symmetry to this goodbye. In June 2021, before her first retirement, the Board honored her at Fuller Lodge with a weaving from the Chimayó Trading Post. This May, in that same room, we announced her successor. Five years, one building, and in between, the return nobody planned and everybody needed.
As for what's next: grandchildren, more of them now than the last time she tried this. Time to think. And, knowing her, not much stillness. “I just have kind of a feeling that there'll be another door that'll open at some point,” she says.
Retirement attempt number five is underway.
From all of us at United Way Northern New Mexico, the team you built, the partners you connected, the communities you refused to stop showing up for: thank you, Cindy. You spent forty years thanking everyone else. Every donor, every volunteer, every nonprofit leader who crossed your path left your presence feeling that they mattered. This once, the gratitude runs the other way. For the early mornings and the long meetings. For coming home. For coming back. For every time your voice caught while telling a room full of nonprofits what they mean to the world — and for meaning every word. Whatever door opens next, we know one thing about the woman who'll walk through it: she'll be of service. She doesn't know another way.