When All Boats Float: Community, Belonging, and Economic Justice with Nare Jagroop

Welcome to our newest board member, Nare Jagroop! There is a phrase Nare returns to again and again, a kind of personal north star: When we help each other out, all boats float. For Nare, it is not just a saying. It is a belief system, shaped by decades of lived experience, hard-won wisdom, and an unwavering conviction that when we lift each other, everyone rises.

Nare recently joined MAF’s board of directors, bringing with him a remarkable arc of experience as an immigrant, CPA, corporate finance leader, and nonprofit executive. But more than any resume line, what Nare brings to MAF is something harder to quantify: a deep, personal understanding of what it means to arrive in this country with very little, and to know firsthand that community is what makes the difference between surviving and thriving.

Roots Rooted in Community

Nare was born in Guyana and immigrated to the Bay Area at five years old. His parents arrived a full year ahead of him and his sister, leaving the children with trusted community members back home while they worked to establish a foothold in America.

“Even though my parents weren’t immediately there, we felt completely comfortable,” Nare recalls. “I come from a background where aunts and uncles, even people you just call aunts and uncles, participate in your family. Everyone’s kind of a cousin. We couldn’t do it alone.”

When the family reunited and settled in the East Bay, the pattern of community support continued. Neighbors woke the children at 5 in the morning to take them in while their mother worked night and early morning nursing shifts. Strangers in Fresno handed his parents dishes and showed them how to take the bus. Friends helped them file forms, access services, and navigate a new world. His father never forgot any of them and eventually took his children back to Fresno just to meet the people who had made it all possible.

“Just having that help, having people willing to help you when you need help, made the biggest difference,” he says. “Otherwise, I don’t know where we’d be.”

That memory lives in Nare not as nostalgia, but as conviction.

A Career Built on Values, Not Just Finance

Nare went on to UC Berkeley, became a CPA, and built a long career in finance, including nearly 24 years at Levi Strauss & Co. He stayed so long, he says, because of the company’s values. “It was really important to me that an organization sticks with its values. Profit with principles, not at all costs.”

But it was his final chapter before retirement, serving as a finance leader at Goodwill of San Francisco, that crystallized what he had always believed. At Goodwill, he was no longer working for shareholders. He was working for people living in their cars and still showing up to work every day. For people who had been incarcerated and couldn’t get a job because of a past mistake. For families sending money home, they could barely afford it. For people who were, as he puts it, “in a spiral they couldn’t get out of.”

“When you’re working a minimum wage job trying to survive, you’re in survival mode,” Nare says. “And then you get a traffic ticket and can’t pay. Your car gets impounded. You lose your job. It’s like you can’t even bridge out of the situation you’re in.”

He saw up close how financial precarity isn’t a character flaw. It is often just a stumble with no safety net. And he brought to that work the same humility his own upbringing had taught him: that fragility is universal. “Something could change just like that, even now in my life. You get sick. Something happens to someone you love. All of a sudden, you’re in a bad situation.”

Goodwill also gave Nare a framework he carries forward: safety, belonging, and learning. “Once we articulated it,” he reflects, “it was like, ‘Ah, this is so obvious.’ But it took a lot of work to get there.” He knows now that until people feel safe and feel like they belong, they cannot begin to thrive.

Why MAF, and Why Now

When Nare first learned more about Mission Asset Fund through a mutual connection with MAF’s CEO Jose Quiñonez, he recognized something immediately familiar.

“The more I learned about the organization, the more I was like, wow. This is something I can really relate to, because that was me. I was a client. I was a participant at some point in time, when I was basically very vulnerable as a young immigrant in America with very low resources.”

He saw in MAF the same spirit that had carried his own family through those early years: community showing up without conditions, without judgment, without making help complicated. “An organization that really believes in that, and that’s there as a support structure without a whole lot of expectations — I think it’s so great, because it’s so needed.”

He officially joined the board in February 2026 and came away from his first board retreat energized. “Everyone could relate to the mission directly. Everyone had their own story. They were all great representations of folks who can identify with the work being done.”

What He’s Bringing to MAF

Nare’s financial expertise, built across decades of corporate and nonprofit finance leadership, is an obvious contribution to MAF’s governance. But he is quick to frame his role more broadly.

“I really look at what I can do to make an impact and change an outcome,” he says. “A lot of it is just being a thought partner, someone who can identify with the needs of the community and not be afraid of that.”

He is particularly focused on reaching the people who right now are too afraid to be reached, communities that, in the current political climate, have gone into hiding.

“There are a lot of populations right now that are terrified,” he says. “You can’t find people who need help because they’re too busy hiding. They’re in survival mode. And my personal feeling is some of that fear is deliberate. Make people afraid, make them feel like they don’t belong, because belonging is powerful.”

That is exactly why belonging is central to what Nare hopes to bring to MAF’s work: the belief that everyone has a right to be here, a right to seek help, and a right to not just survive, but to thrive.

“If I could get that belief out to the client base and build it systemically through programs, that’s what I’m going to try and do.”

A Hope for What’s Possible

When asked what he hopes for MAF’s future, Nare doesn’t hesitate. He wants to remove stigmas. He wants second chances to be automatic. He envisions what he calls “a concierge of solutions,” a single point of contact that can meet people wherever they are and help bridge them toward what’s next.

“One mistake, one break point, shouldn’t cause your whole life to flip upside down,” he says. “It’s messy to be a person. There are speed bumps and potholes. How nice would it be if we could all support each other in those times?”

At its heart, Nare’s vision is the same one that has always animated MAF: that financial empowerment is not a transaction but a relationship, and that communities thrive when they show up for one another.

“It’s a belief system,” he says simply. “Things are possible. You have to believe, be committed, and know it’s going to take a collective we.”

MAF is proud to have Nare Jagroop as part of its leadership, and excited to see that collectively we grow stronger.