Most people don’t find their calling in preschool, but Emily Zepeda did – it just took her 19 years to figure it out.

“I remember reading to a student in preschool who came in a couple weeks after the start of the year,” she said. “I remember going up to her because she was new, like me, and I found out her first language was Spanish, like mine. I wanted to make her feel included, so I pretended to read to her in Spanish.”

It was a memory Emily had no reason to call to mind, for years and years. Then, after graduating from San Jose State University with a degree in psychology and Chicano studies, she became a program leader in her childhood community. As part of her program work, she went back to the same preschool she’d attended as a child. And the memories came flooding back. “The same couch was still there, the school smelled the same way. It was just a full circle moment,” she said.

Working in her old preschool, in addition to triggering old memories, also pointed her to a next chapter. “It was through that position that I realized that speech therapy actually existed,” she said, “and rather than waiting to provide services to kids who need extra support, if we’re able to start intervention earlier, that’s really beneficial.”

She shadowed a speech therapist and saw the impact that they were making. She also discovered many Spanish-speaking kids and families weren’t able to receive the services they needed in a language they could understand. “There’s a gap there,” she said. “In certain communities like mine, there are a lot of Spanish-speaking individuals, but a lot of times, the services that are given are given in a different area, a different language.”

To ensure Spanish-speaking students like herself and the classmate she “read” to in preschool receive the support they need to succeed in school and in life, Emily plans to specialize in providing Spanish-language and bilingual speech therapy services. She also envisions someday broadening her areas of specialty to include Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices and neurodivergence. “The barriers are just so diverse,” she said. “But I don’t think differences are bad. We should embrace our differences. They make us who we are – even if they mean sometimes we need a little extra support.”

She believes her drive to make a difference and her urge to work with children and families are rooted in values her parents instilled in her, growing up – values they honed as Amway IBOs. “Amway has been in my life for years, “ she said. “My mom introduced Amway tools years back, and what really stood out to me was how much Amway values family.”

Looking to the future, Emily hopes to pass along what she’s learned. And she hopes the students and families she meets pass along what she teaches them, as well. “If I’m able to make the difference in one person’s life, maybe they’re able to do that for someone else,” she said. “That’s the butterfly effect: You impact someone, and they impact the people around them.”