But something even bigger happened that day. Tapia, who emigrated 40 years ago with just a sixth-grade education, started thinking of ways to give other Latino students the same opportunity his son had. Now he has another reason to be proud: Tapia received the 2008 $100,000 Purpose Prize in honor of his work launching the Bay Area Gardener’s Foundation, which gives scholarships to disadvantaged Latino students.

At its conception, after Noel helped his father with the legal documents to launch the foundation, Tapia approached his clients for funding.

“I was afraid to ask them for money at first,” says Tapia, who in 2008 also won a Jefferson Award for Public Service, awarded by Carnegie Endowment and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. “What if I got fired?” Surprised to raise $10,000 in two weeks, he recruited other gardeners to ask for donations from clients, local charities, and Latino-owned businesses. Two years ago, the foundation awarded its first grants—$1,500 each—to five students, just enough to help pay for textbooks, housing, transportation, or a computer. Since then, the charity has raised nearly $300,000 and awarded 30 scholarships to both documented and undocumented students. “Nothing should stand in the way of a child getting a good education,” says Tapia.

Many of the scholarship students are the first in their family to go to college. Marlene Castro, 18, of Redwood City, whose father is a gardener and whose mother owns a house-cleaning business, won a scholarship in 2008. “It’s difficult for my parents to even make a house payment, so without Catalino’s help I would have gone to a community college and tried to transfer,” says Castro, who intends to pursue a double major in media studies and rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley.

Her mother, Ana Ramirez Castro, says, “Nothing makes a parent prouder than knowing your child has done well. I got chills all over when Catalino phoned to tell us Marlene had won.” Marlene’s academic success has inspired her younger brother, Jose Jr., to apply for a foundation grant to attend the Academy of Art University in San Francisco next year.

Bay Area Gardener's Foundation The Bay Area Gardener’s Foundation offers $1,500 scholarships to low-income students from nine San Francisco Bay area counties. Applicants must maintain a minimum 2.5 grade point average for the entire school year and commit to 20 hours of community service at a nonprofit organization each semester. E-mail info@bagf.org or write: BAFG P.O. Box 3446 Redwood City, CA 94064 Phone: 650-655-2002 Purpose Prize The Purpose Prize aims to engage millions of boomers in encore careers that combine social impact, personal meaning, and continued income in the second half of life — and produce a windfall of human talent to solve society’s most pressing issues.

Every grant is critical, given that only only 14 percent of U.S.-born and 5 percent of foreign-born Latinos earned bachelor’s degrees, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Low-income Latino families place high value on a college education, but financial constraints often block their dreams, according to the Public Policy Institute. In addition, students and parents may be unfamiliar with the school system and local resources, says institute economist Deborah Reed. “Parents these days have to advocate for their child through the K–12 years to be sure their kids are getting the right college preparatory class work,” she says. “Foreign-born parents often trust the schools to take care of that, but where one guidance counselor may be assigned to hundreds of students, the schools can’t do the job.”