Mamá y Papá,
I have been building something. You have watched parts of it come together — the late calls about data pipelines, the grant drafts at the kitchen table, the questions about how to measure whether equity work is actually working. What I want to tell you now is that the thing I have been building has a name and a place for the two of you in it. Not a courtesy mention. A real seat at the table. En la mesa.
TresPies is a consulting and research firm rooted in the communities everyone else overlooks — bilingual, data-driven, built for Dane County and eventually much further. And the Madison Equity Data Institute — MEDI — is its research home: the nonprofit infrastructure that will let us apply for federal grants, partner with universities, and put community-level data in the hands of the people it concerns. I am formally inviting each of you to join both.
You spent a career asking what it would look like to put real data tools in the hands of farmers-market vendors, street entrepreneurs, informal-economy workers — people whose economic lives barely appear in the datasets that supposedly describe them. Farm2Facts is that work made real. The Kaufman Lab is that work made institutional. Twenty-five hundred citations and a Vilas Distinguished chair are the credential world's way of saying: this matters.
MEDI is that same work given a new home — alongside your son, in the city where you built your career. As Principal Investigator, your name opens doors I cannot open alone: NSF, USDA, the funders who require a recognized researcher on the grant. As Academic Advisor, you help us make sure the Equity Atlas is methodologically honest, not just politically useful. Eso es lo que siempre hiciste — hacer que el trabajo cuente de verdad. That is what I am asking you to keep doing, here, with me.
You reshaped who gets into the College of Engineering. You built workshops on bias that actually changed how people behave — not because they were told to feel differently, but because you measured what changed and what did not. A Stanford sociology doctorate, a Chancellor’s Award for leadership, a city commissioner seat — and still, the gift I have watched my whole life is simpler: you know how to walk into a room full of people who have been told they do not belong, and make the room make space.
For TresPies, that is exactly the work: designing equity programs that hold up under scrutiny, and measuring whether they deliver. When we go to a foundation and say “this intervention worked,” it needs to mean something. Your evaluation expertise — real program evaluation, not just anecdote — is what makes that claim credible. And you have already been doing it informally: you opened doors for Night Shift, you have been quietly steering the community reach. I am just asking you to let that be official. Que seas reconocida por lo que ya eres.
I want to be honest about what this is and what it is not. I am not asking you to clear your calendars or change your lives. Papá, you have a lab and a department and decades of work in motion — MEDI fits alongside that, it does not compete with it. Mamá, your role as Associate Dean is your work, your accomplishment, yours — this is an extension, not a replacement. What I am asking for is your names, your judgment, and your trust. The rest we figure out together.
What I am also saying — and I mean this the way you taught me to mean things — is that building this without you would feel like setting a table and leaving the two most important seats empty. TresPies is a family name. “Tres pies,” three legs, the stool that holds. You are two of those legs. I am just the one trying to build the stool.
Los quiero mucho. Gracias por todo lo que me dieron para llegar hasta aqui. Thank you for everything that got me here.
With love and a whole lot of belief in what we can do together,
— Cruz
Founder & CEO, TresPies LLC
Madison, Wisconsin