First Person: How Mentorship Became My Life’s Work

Ray Nuñez with his son at the U.S. Small Business Administration Awards with his award for Rhode Island’s Young Entrepreneurs of the Year.

In February 2020, my wife, Taryn Nuñez, and I quit our jobs and launched a creative agency together called Nuñez. There was no ideal moment, no shortage of people who thought we should wait, and no way of knowing we were one week away from a global pandemic.

We launched anyway, and over the next six years, Nuñez grew into one of Rhode Island’s most respected marketing and fundraising firms. We led the creative campaign behind the 2020 ballot referendum to remove “Providence Plantations” from the state’s official name. We built the marketing infrastructure behind 401Gives and watched it grow into a campaign that has raised more than $20 million for nonprofits across the state. We branded, launched and supported hundreds of organizations across Rhode Island and New England, and in 2025, the U.S. Small Business Administration recognized us as Rhode Island’s Young Entrepreneurs of the Year.

So the natural question is, why I would step back from leading it?

The answer is something I have been sitting with for a long time. I came to the United States from Los Reyes, Michoacán, Mexico in 1999, and the path from there to here was not something I figured out alone. There were teachers, mentors and adults who decided to invest time in me, and those relationships changed the direction of my life. I have known for years that I owed something back to that idea, and I eventually reached a point where I could not keep running a firm that helps other organizations advance their missions without turning that same energy toward the mission that is most personal to me.

What started as a consulting engagement with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Rhode Island turned into the most meaningful career decision I have ever made. This month, I took the reins as Chief Advancement Officer. It feels like where I was always supposed to be. Today we launched Big Believers, a statewide campaign asking Rhode Islanders to make a monthly commitment to mentorship, because the young people on our waitlist deserve the same shot that so many gave me.

Taryn and I built Nuñez together, and it was important to me that the agency was in a strong position before I shifted my focus. Taryn returns to lead the team as Chief Creative Officer, Joab Garza moves into the Director of Operations seat, Ale Pereyra has been promoted to Senior Designer, and Germán Aréchiga joins the team as Executive Operations Specialist. I continue on as Senior Advisor, which means the work we started six years ago continues in excellent hands and I am able to make this transition without reservation.

BBBSRI is the largest and oldest youth mentoring organization in Rhode Island, celebrating sixty years of service this year, and what drew me in beyond the mission is the depth of how they actually do this work. Most people picture a Big and a Little, two people spending time together in the community, and assume that the organization’s primary job is making that introduction and stepping back. The reality is far more layered. Every match is supported by a professionally trained case manager who stays in regular contact with the mentor, the mentee, and the family for the full life of the relationship. Nearly half the program team is bilingual, which matters enormously in a state as diverse as Rhode Island. At some point early on, someone mentioned to me that the average BBBSRI match lasts three years. Knowing that the national average is thirteen months, that one number told me more about this organization than anything else I had read.

That gap is worth pausing on, because research consistently shows that mentoring relationships shorter than twelve months can actually cause harm to a young person rather than help them. In a state where nearly 40 percent  of youth have experienced at least one Adverse Childhood Experience, the length and quality of a match is not a performance metric, it is the intervention itself. Mentored youth across the BBBS network are 46 percent less likely to begin using drugs and 27 percent less likely to start using alcohol, and they skip school at roughly half the rate of their unmatched peers. Ninety percent of BBBS alumni say their mentor helped them make better decisions well into adulthood. When I read those numbers, I recognize something in them, because I lived a version of that story. The people who stayed consistent in my life shaped choices I made long after our time together formally ended.

One thing I did not fully appreciate until I got close to this organization is how BBBSRI sustains itself financially. The Donation Center Foundation of Rhode Island is a statewide social enterprise that collects clothing, linens, and small household items through home pickups, drop-off centers and donation bins placed across the state. Through a long-standing partnership with Savers Thrift Stores, the Donation Center funds approximately 70 percent of BBBSRI’s annual operating costs, raises more than $150,000 a year for other local nonprofits, and keeps three to five million pounds of materials out of Rhode Island landfills every year. When a family schedules a free curbside pickup of old clothes, they are contributing directly to a mentoring relationship in a way that most people would never think to connect.

Big Believers is the program I wish had existed for the people who invested in me. It is an invitation to 1 percent of Rhode Islanders, roughly 10,000 people, to give $20 a month so that a young person somewhere in this state gets paired with a consistent adult in their corner who shows up and keeps showing up. Most of us can point to at least one person who did that for us, including me, and Big Believers is the way you do it for someone else without it requiring a huge lift. Big Believers for Business brings that same invitation to Rhode Island companies at $100 a month, with a goal of enrolling 1,000 businesses alongside individual donors. Rhode Island is a small state, and when enough people here decide something matters, things move quickly. I am counting on exactly that.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Rhode Island has been changing lives in this state for sixty years, and I am here to help make sure it can do that for sixty more.

Big Believers monthly giving enrollment is open today at BigsRI.org. Clothing and household item donations are accepted at DonateRI.org.