Inga Cotton’s interest in public school choice began in 1992, when she wrote a paper on the topic for an introductory political science class. She put the idea on a shelf for a while, graduated with a bachelor’s in history, and went on to law school.
“Now, in hindsight, I get it because I like research and writing. I like making persuasive arguments. I like knowing how things work… But practicing law was not the right fit for me,” she says.
Later, as a mom, she picked up the topic again when she began to research the schools options in San Antonio. “It felt like in order to choose your school, you had to sell your house and move. That’s pretty drastic to leave your neighborhood. And even then, it’s hard to compare how different schools are doing to each other.”
Her difficulty with finding the right school for her son led her to start San Antonio Charter Moms, a five-year passion project that has now become a nonprofit. “Knowing how hard it was for us, I want to make it easier for other families. I want to give them the tools they need to get to the right answer more quickly, with fewer wrong turns and fewer missteps along the way, hopefully less stress,” she explains.
Her long-term goal is to improve the overall quality of education in San Antonio. “Maybe some of us are gonna put in a lot of time and effort to do the research, but I want to make it safe so that anybody can enroll their kid in their neighborhood school, and they’re getting a good education. But there’s just a lot of work to do to get there,” she says.
She’s done a lot of learning along the way. “It helps to be humble and call in experts sometimes,” she admits. In fact, one of those experts, Amy Johnson of Maker Mama Media, led her to The Impact Guild a little over a year ago.
“She’s an experienced craft blogger, but she’s also a social media expert, and she was helping us improve our search engine optimization and planning Facebook ads,” Inga says of Amy. They often met at The Impact Guild to discuss San Antonio Charter Moms’ media strategy, and when the coworking space Inga was at closed, she relocated here.
When she started at The Impact Guild, she was excited to receive her Kiva gift card. As someone who considers herself an artist at heart, she chose to invest in a jeweler in Peru who needed raw materials to make jewelry to sell. “I knew Kiva existed, but The Impact Guild got me to create the account… The act of investing in Kiva, I think it gets people thinking about how that would apply globally in their work.”
The Impact Guild has also provided Inga a physical space to invest in her nonprofit, both online and in-person. From her Dedicated Desk, she’s grown her Facebook group to over 5000 members. And the conference rooms and event spaces here have allowed her to bring the community together in-person.
After an event she had planned with another organization didn’t get enough RSVPs, she put out a call on her Facebook group for people to bring their lunch and come talk about schools. “We had like a dozen people show up on really short notice. And people who didn’t know each other before. And so we just sat around, we ate our lunches, we shared, we answered questions… Just a really good discussion, and it was something spontaneous,” she remembers fondly.
She loves that The Impact Guild is a space that makes people feel comfortable so that conversations and events like that can happen. Whether it’s the homey smell of coffee brewing or a friendly smile when you walk through the door, she says, “There’s always that human touch, not that uncertainty of ‘Do I belong here?’ It’s like, yes, you belong here! You’re in the right place! Your problems are gonna get solved!’”