(Amber Renee Dixon) She's dedicated her life to helping abused and at-risk children, Christina Vela, CEO of St.

Jude's Ranch for Children, is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

♪♪ -Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt and other supporters.

-Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

For almost 60 years, St.

Jude's Ranch for Children has provided a safe home for thousands of abused and neglected children; and its CEO has spent her entire professional career helping this exact population.

Christina Vela, CEO of St.

Jude's Ranch for Children, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank you.

Thanks for being here.

-So your entire career has been in social work, which is widely regarded as one of the toughest types of work out there.

Why did you choose it, and when did you choose it?

(Christina Vela) Yeah.

It's a great question.

I think it chose me in a few different episodes in my life or chapters of my life.

As a child, I grew up in a house full of helpers, not professional, not in the sense of like therapists or school teachers or anything like that.

My parents were hard working people, but not in that professional sort of regard.

But I grew up with a family that just always had an open door to family members that were struggling with different things, and so there was just always people in my house coming to see my parents so that they could get guidance on marriage or divorce or all kinds of things.

And so I just grew up.

So that was sort of chapter one, with just always people around.

Chapter two is me thinking that I knew better than my parents when they, you know, wanted something different for me.

And then I found myself as a high school student pregnant, and that chapter thrust me into a lot of challenges that I'm sure my parents wish I would have maybe avoided.

But I had one of the most incredible influences in my life when I became a mother.

So I was a teen mom, but that daughter, my oldest daughter, became the reason for everything.

So that chapter was really about finding myself and setting a new standard of love in my home and making sure that my daughter always had a good role model.

And then by the time it came to choosing a career, it just felt like I wanted to help other teen moms.

And at that time, I had the opportunity to work with teen moms in foster care, and it just picked me.

And I had something to share about how hard it is to overcome adversity and to be a single mother, and I could relate to so many of the girls that I was working with.

And 30-plus years later, here I am.

-That was in the San Fernando Valley where you grew up?

-Yeah, in Southern California.

-How did your parents react to the news of your pregnancy?

-Oh, that was a really tough day.

Actually, my mom, I told my mom first, and then she went and told my dad and drove him around for about three hours to help him calm down, because his reaction was probably going to be like any other parent when they find out their teenage daughter's pregnant.

And I couldn't have anticipated-- I mean, my mom did a great job of helping my dad calm down, but when he walked in the door, he was, I think, past the anger, but his immediate solution was that I needed to get married.

And that person that I was pregnant from was not somebody that I was in a long-term relationship with or probably somebody that, in hindsight, I would have picked.

And he was older than me, and he was happy to get married to a young high school student.

And unfortunately, I couldn't have anticipated the challenge that relationship was going to be.

So my parents, I think, thought the best thing for me to do was to get married, based on culture and religion and all of those influences.

But, boy, it was a tough time of my life.

-Culture.

Your father was an immigrant from...?

-Mexico.

-And so then I'm assuming Catholic.

-Yep, raised Catholic.

-Okay.

And then Mom was in foster care herself.

-She was, yeah.

She was an only child, and my grandmother had died when my mom was an adolescent, and my grandfather, unfortunately, was an alcoholic.

And so she lived some really challenging times and then came into foster care.

And the day she graduated from high school, she remembers walking off of the school field.

She had packed her bags from the group home she was living in and was trying to find a way forward.

And not too long thereafter met my father who didn't have a lot, didn't speak English.

My mom didn't speak any Spanish, and but my dad had just this whole life full of family and religion and culture, and my mom found, I think, her forever family in my dad pretty quickly.

And then within a year, I came along.

So I'm the oldest, and I'm the only daughter.

-And when you say that social work chose you, I mean, you are still working with youth who are aging out of the foster care system and also teen moms.

-Yes.

-Do you still relay your personal experience to teen moms?

-I do.

I do.

I tell them quite often, I know-- Especially now as the CEO, they don't really believe me, but my kids and my family do a lot of things with me when we have weekend-- We did like a back-to-school shopping every year, and my children, they're all adults now, they volunteer their time.

And there's-- I don't say this to everybody, but there'll be times-- Just recently in August, when we went back-to-school shopping, we went to lunch afterwards with all the kids and all the donors, and my daughter was there.

And I happened to be talking to a teen mom who was really struggling with a lot of things, and her little son was sitting at the table.

And I said, Do you see that girl over there?

And she said, Oh, yeah, I met her before.

I said, That's my daughter.

And she, you know, my daughter's 34.

And she was like, That's your daughter?

I'm like, Yep.

I said, I was you.

And she's like, Really, Miss Christina?

Like, really?

I'm like, Yes.

I wasn't in foster care, but I was you.

And she's come to see me several times in my office, and we've talked about college and all the things that she has at her just, you know, of resources that she has available.

But it's hard because you have to choose it, and it's scary if you don't know anybody that's ever gone to college or things like that.

And that was my lived experience.

I had never known anybody who had done big things like that.

So it's pretty incredible to be able to still share those experiences with young people.

-And you were the first in your family to go to college?

-Yes.

-Wow.

You told Voyage LA that you were determined to prove people wrong who thought you couldn't do big things.

But then once you got to that point, having graduated college with two degrees-- -I have three now.

-Three now?

-But two at that time, yeah, I think so.

- --you realized that it was you who you really needed to show that to.

There are so many people out there, I think, that live for the validation that they receive from other people.

How does someone get away from that?

How did it work for you?

-Yeah, I mean, I kind of stumbled upon it.

I mean, really, the day of my graduation with my undergrad, my dad had tears in his eyes and said, I'm so sorry that I ever doubted you.

And in-- I had a choice.

I could have said, Yeah, it was hurtful.

It made me feel less than, all of those things.

But the truth is I realized what I was capable of, and so I said, Dad, actually, I'm going to thank you, because had you not been so, you know, pessimistic about my life, maybe I wouldn't have challenged myself so hard.

And so the lesson for me was, watch out world.

I know what I'm capable of.

I'm not maybe the smartest person in the room, but I know how to work.

I know how to work hard.

I know how to put the hours in.

I know how to stay steadfast.

Doesn't mean my life has been perfect.

Doesn't mean there haven't been times when I was like, What was I thinking?

But, yeah, the sense of self-satisfaction, the sense of like, well, I don't have to have all the answers to the world or how to fix things, but I know that I can contribute.

I tease oftentimes that I'm a hustler for hope, that I hustle all day long; but it comes from a place of I really want people to know that they have, they have within them everything that they need.

They just have to believe in it and, yes, refine their skills and learn more and grow.

But we're all incredibly capable people.

-How hard is it to reconnect with that part of your life?

Doesn't it seem like an eternity ago?

-It does seem so long ago.

A couple of things that I've done is I've practiced probably every 10 years or so, and it's generally around the time when somebody's asked me to come speak.

I've written a letter to my younger self, and I write it as my older self writing it to my younger self.

And I thank my younger self for having the courage to do the things that she did.

Because in hindsight, it doesn't quite make sense how, at that time, the younger me went to school full-time, worked full-time, was a full-time mom and trying to get a, get out of an unhealthy marriage that was abusive and not kind to me and there was a lot of problems.

Logically, it doesn't make sense.

But I write in my letter to my younger self how, how grateful I am for her boldness and how I will honor that by being bold or courageous in this stage of my life.

And I've written that letter to myself a few times, and I've even guided other young women or at conferences to take the time to write a letter to yourself.

You'll be surprised how much you never thanked yourself for because it's so easy to say, Yeah, I did that, but now I have to do all these other things.

And so it's really incredible to be able to reflect on progress and honor even the smallest changes.

Sometimes they're really big, but just the change in mindset is so incredible.

-How long have you been in Las Vegas now or Southern Nevada?

-Yeah.

It's been 22 years.

-Wow!

-So yeah, Southern Nevada has been home, raised all three of my children here in Vegas.

Two were born in California, but the baby was born here, and she just turned 21.

I can't believe it.

-Moving here, you have been working with abused and neglected children for decades.

Was it here where you were introduced to the sex trafficking survivor aspect of the children you were helping, or had you experienced that before?

-No.

It was really working in Southern Nevada that I started to realize that there was such a pressing need to serve child victims of sex trafficking.

I think as-- I mean, I was social worker for all these years.

Nobody had talked about it.

I had gone to countless trainings and my degrees, and nobody was really talking about that oftentimes child victims of sex trafficking, the pipeline is kids that are victims of abuse and neglect in their childhood.

It's children already in foster care.

And I had a huge aha moment about that and started realizing, you know, we just hadn't, hadn't been trained.

And so I started doing a lot of research.

And of course in this community, like many communities across the country, there is a huge need to focus on protecting children especially from child sex trafficking.

-So you're not only the CEO of St.

Jude's Ranch for Children, but now the Healing Center, which is specifically for children who are believed to be victims of sex trafficking.

Has it impacted you in any way to be now a part of that kind of work, or is it all just hard?

-It's all hard and it's all incredibly fulfilling, and it challenges me in ways that reminds me it's not about me.

So on a tough day, I might take a moment to take care of myself, but I have work to do.

There are so many children that are in need, and not because I do it by myself, because I don't.

This organization is extraordinary with the people that work here and this physical campus that we have, which is really incredible.

But together, it just, all of these pieces together, helps me feel like I'm doing my part.

-And last thing, what does self-care look like to you?

-Oh, a lot of reading for fun.

I do a ton of Pilates, and I spend a lot of time with my family.

I have a really great family, and we spend a lot of time together.

And so it just fills my cup up.

But, but work is, is my passion.

So there is-- I live a very balanced life.

There's a lot of work hours, but there's a lot of joy that I get from the day-to-day.

And so it's all kind of one life I'm living, and I'm really grateful for it.

-Christina Vela, CEO of St.

Jude's Ranch for Children, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank you so much.