Baker Ripley CEO Claudia Aguirre ‘92 Helps Houstonians Discover Their Strengths

In her work as CEO of the Houston-based nonprofit Baker-Ripley, Claudia Aguirre '92 often uncovers the strengths of the people she serves by prompting them with the same phrase — tell me a time. “Tell me a time that you did something great,” she might say. Or, “Tell me a time when your own trajectory was set in motion.”

From College Fair to Community Leader

For Aguirre, that pivotal moment occurred when she was an El Paso high school student, attending a college fair. Aguirre, born in Juárez, Mexico, saw few campus representatives who looked like her until she found the St. Edward’s table. There, a Latina student was eager to share how welcoming the hilltop was.

“It would be the conversation I had with that young student ... that put into words what I was feeling, which was this need to be around people who were diverse and loving and thinking about the world and not just themselves,” Aguirre says.

At St. Edward’s, Aguirre found a lifelong purpose in the Holy Cross mission, with its focus on social justice and equity. “The Holy Cross principles, to me, were about inclusivity — that every one of us belongs here,” she says. “None of us were accidents. We were all put here for a better good, and to live up to our principles meant you had to honor others.”

Leading BakerRipley, One of Houston’s Largest Nonprofits

These days, at BakerRipley, Aguirre is constantly thinking about building up and honoring others. Founded in 1907, BakerRipley is one of the largest charitable organizations in the country. Its mission is to offer resources, education and career opportunities through community centers and an array of services for children, seniors, families, veterans and immigrants.

Aguirre leads the massive organization, which serves 500,000 people in the Houston region annually with a $500 million budget, 1,400 employees, 67 locations and hundreds of volunteers. She’s deployed urgent, large-scale emergency responses — setting up a shelter for 10,000 people after Hurricane Harvey and designing a housing initiative to prevent homelessness during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But BakerRipley’s impact is year-round and ongoing. Its annual community engineer program, for example, teaches participants about how government works and the basics of advocacy so they can launch their own efforts to improve their neighborhoods.

“We truly believe that the people we need to lead are already in the community,” Aguirre says. “So when we go into communities, we don’t come to solve people’s problems. We come to help them discover their own strengths.”