Olga Sanchez de la Vega: A Helping Hand

<figure id="attachment_40121" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-40121" style="width: 300px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://laprensa-sandiego.org/featured/olga-sanchez-de-la-vega-a-helping…; rel="attachment wp-att-40121"><img loading="lazy" src="http://laprensa-sandiego.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/image1-300x300…; alt="" width="300" height="300" class="size-medium wp-image-40121" srcset="https://dev-laprensa.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/image1-… 300w, https://dev-laprensa.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/image1-… 150w, https://dev-laprensa.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/image1… 427w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px"></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-40121" class="wp-caption-text">Olga Sánchez de la Vega</figcaption></figure>
While many of us feel that the day has too many hours, Olga Sanchez de la Vega devotes all of her day to helping out people in the community.
Sanchez de la Vega was born and raised in the Santa Isabel neighborhood of Mexicali, Baja California, a community of farmers. 
“Santa Isabel is where I went to kindergarten and elementary school,” said Sanchez de la Vega. “My mom was one of the community founders.” 
From an early age, Olga excelled in school and kept busy with various activities.
“As a child I was involved in all school activities, I read books and did theater, I was in color guard, I played basketball, did poetry, and painting. I was always busy,” Sanchez de la Vega said.
After graduating from elementary school, Sanchez de la Vega was recognized as the school’s best student with an award. 
“I couldn’t believe it because I thought doing well in school that was part of who I was and did not know it was something extraordinary,” she recalled. “I did not know that things could be done without giving one’s best.”
It was this energy and drive to give her very best which allowed her to help those around her as she grew up. 
At 14 years old, Sanchez de la Vega and her family moved to Delano, California, where she worked helping farmworker mothers. 
“I got to work in the field cutting grapes. I realized that it is a difficult and delicate job and to cut a bunch of grapes the right way you had to take a lot of things into account and move fast,” explained Sanchez de la Vega.
After a day in the field, she found that mothers who were working in the fields could not give their full attention to their children due to their schedules. So she began working as a nanny to help women in her community.
“I decided to be a babysitter by helping four families. They dropped off the kids at about 2 a.m. I took care of them until about 3 p.m.”
After graduating from high school, Olga came to San Diego, where after months of working as a barista and as a makeup artist, she began working in mobile phone sales for Pacific Bell, now AT&T.
“The company was growing and growing when I arrived,” Sanchez de la Vega told La Prensa San Diego. “Once I was hired by them, I felt I had a lifelong career there.”
During the 17 years in which Sanchez de la Vega worked with AT&T, she held all kinds of positions, from retail sales, to managing an AT&T Wireless store in Downtown San Diego, to making wholesale deals at the corporate level.
Despite climbing to the top of the company, the work that brought her the most satisfaction while at AT&T was being involved with the company’s Hacemos program.
“Hacemos is an initiative that helps the Hispanic community. I was in charge of Hacemos’ High Tech Day project and did everything to find funds so that children can have scholarships to go to school,” Sanchez de la Vega elaborated.
“I planned everything that was community service related. I was researching how to help Latinos and did education programs in STEM topics which were brought to kids through the High Tech Day programs,” she added.
“The goal of the STEM education programs was to make Latino youth unafraid to enter those programs and want to be part of them. The most important thing was we got them to be excited about science and math.”
Sanchez de la Vega was not only involved with AT&T’s initiatives, but was donating her time and efforts to other nonprofits such as Susan G. Komen, March of Dimes and United Way at the same time.
Sanchez de la Vega left AT&T to start a couple of companies that she currently manages. 
One of these, Angel’s Home Surrogacy Consulting Services, helps women in the community to reach a dream that can be hard to reach.
“I got the opportunity to work with people with fertility problems and so I left AT&T,” says Sanchez de la Vega. I applied everything I learned at AT&T and today we help create plans for patients looking to have a baby through surrogacy and egg donation.” 
“I feel like all my jobs prepared me to help people who want to live their dream of being a mom and having a family,” adds Sanchez de la Vega.
Sanchez de la Vega also leads another company: The O Xperience, which helps entrepreneurs achieve their goals by improving their customer experience, customer training, development, and branding experiences. 
When questioned about why she does all of this work for others, she has a simple response.
“People asked me how much I was being paid for working all day. My jobs are paid, but everything else is done for free because I feel it is a way to give something back to my community.”
With this altruistic attitude, Sanchez de la Vega will continue to help many more people in our region for years to come.