Crystal Wise
Jennifer Trevino’s path to her position of executive director of Leadership Fort Worth is simply more evidence that the future has a mind all its own.
“If you told me 15 years ago I’d be doing this, I’d have said, ‘You’re crazy,’” she says. “But I wouldn't have thought I'd be on the Zoning Commission or City Planning Commission or the Race and Culture Task Force, or run for office.”
Leadership Fort Worth is the training ground for current and future leaders of Fort Worth, through mentoring and education a diverse pool of leaders who will serve as the impetus for a healthy city. They might go on to serve on boards or even the City Council dais. Whatever it is, they go on to serve the community at large.
Leadership Fort Worth, one of the oldest community leadership-development programs in the nation, administers three adult programs and one for youth — eighth graders — in the Fort Worth school district.
Trevino, a graduate of Leadership Fort Worth, class of 2009, has been executive director since 2021, succeeding Harriet Harral, who had been with the organization since 1996. Trevino’s vision is helping mold a more inclusive city.
She is more than merely the face of the organization. The job entails fundraising, marketing, recruiting program participants, business development, a little IT, a little HR.
That’s just to name a few things. The job is like herding cats.
“It's what I like to do and that's kind of what I'm good at, too,” Trevino says. “I'm good at taking things that are not necessarily starting from scratch but taking them to the next level.”
Trevino, 48, was raised just down the Chisholm Trail Parkway in the Johnson County community of Joshua. She left there after high school, her destination West Texas and Texas Tech University in the charming, albeit dusty, hamlet in the hub of the South Plains, Lubbock. There she earned business and marketing degrees.
Trevino earned an MBA at TCU.
She went to work for RadioShack for almost three years before leaving for The University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth. Trevino worked 10 years there as vice president of administration and chief of staff to Drs. Scott Ransom and Michael Williams, both presidents of the institution.
In 2016, she stepped out on a limb, running for the District 2 City Council seat vacated by longtime incumbent Sal Espino, who had appointed her to the City Planning Commission. She eventually lost to Carlos Flores, now in his fourth term.
“I had a lot of people ask me over time if I'd ever consider [running], and I never would have thought [I would]. I enjoyed it, I had fun, I learned a lot about myself, about the city, and met people I wouldn't have otherwise met,” she says of her experience at running for public office. “I tell people, especially women, we can't win if we don't run. But it's like, ‘Well, if not me, then who? And if not now, then when? I can't keep preaching what I'm preaching if I'm not going to step up.”
In the aftermath, Flores appointed her to the Zoning Commission. By the time she had completed her two-year term, she had been on a city board, commission, or task force — some of them concurrently — for 10 years straight.
Whether she would ever run for office again, she can’t say. Trevino has acquired the wisdom that comes only with time and quit trying to predict the future.
It simply knows more.
This story originally appeared in the May issue of Fort Worth Magazine.