Juan Gaytan is a San Diego native who has been involved in a non-profit organization called Encuentros Leadership since he was in high school. Encuentros works with Latinx male youth and in 2017 they developed an academy aimed to encourage their young men to become teachers. Juan became that program's director in 2019 and designed the curriculum based on his own doctoral program research on how to encourage Latinx men to become teachers. The program recruits from all over San Diego and, in the short-term, has been shown to effectively have its attendees consider teaching as a career, even if previously they did not.