Southwest Flavor Ep. 147 - Celina Santana & Taniyah Parker

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, hey, good morning. Welcome to Southwest Flavor. Happy Tuesday to everyone. We have a great show lined up for you today, and our first guest is Celina Santana. Good morning, how are you doing?

**Celina Santana** (0:10)
Good morning, I'm doing great.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:12)
Good, good. Let's bring your microphone up just a little bit closer to, yeah, there you go.

**Celina Santana** (0:17)
How are you doing?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:17)
I'm doing well, I'm doing well. It's gonna be a warm one out there.

**Celina Santana** (0:21)
Yeah, it's already quite toasty.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:23)
Yeah, so that gets us excited. Us in the air conditioning business, you know.

**Celina Santana** (0:28)
Which is good.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:29)
Yes, yes, we want it nice and toasty out there.
So tell us a little bit about yourself. You have a lot of things going on.

**Celina Santana** (0:36)
Oh yes, I've got quite a few, I always do. So more or less is that I do digital marketing for small businesses, so that's my own business in this dance. And then I also do other things as far as contracted work and also volunteer work.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:47)
Okay, wow.

**Celina Santana** (0:49)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:52)
And I think I first met you when you worked for Pima County.

**Celina Santana** (0:55)
Yes, I was working for Pima County. Yeah, I was helping veterans get into jobs and also corporate companies with their grants and also trying to get some employee retention. So in more sense, help them grow as an actual company and make our city stronger in a sense.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:08)
Yeah, that's fantastic. That's one of the biggest things that we're all hoping for is just to make our city stronger, you know, get people off the streets, get them employed, you know.
That's what it's all about. Get them to stay. Yeah, that's true. We've talked a lot about that on our programs is get the younger people to stay, you know, they get their education here and then a lot of times they leave.

**Celina Santana** (1:30)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:31)
So have careers here that they can make good money and, you know, raise a family and stay here.

**Celina Santana** (1:36)
Yeah, and then our city will get stronger and bigger and probably bigger than Phoenix, but.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:42)
So tell us, you know, a little bit about one of the things that you have going on.

**Celina Santana** (1:47)
Well, one is that I'm actually helping elevate EDAZ. They're a good program. They're actually started out of Phoenix and then they're going to be, they're piloted their program over to Green Valley and Sahuarita areas and school districts. So it's more or less a program that helps our high schoolers get into corporate internships, per se, to get their foot in the door, get to know what the corporations that are offered here in the city.
So therefore, when they graduate, they can actually get into those corporations and then we can more or less grow bigger, they stay longer and then therefore our schools get bigger, we have more schools stronger, bigger, in a sense. And then hopefully that the idea of that is that program will actually, at one point, once that's actually a successful pilot, it will be actually dragged into Morana and Oro Valley.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:43)
Oh, nice. Okay. And I think he mentioned also Vail when I was talking to the gentleman.

**Celina Santana** (2:47)
Yes, that's probably another one that's going on. I know it's constantly changing at this point. Therefore it's a pilot.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:53)
Right. But no, it's a great program. I mean, you get the high school kids, they're already invested because they've already been in this program for a couple of years. And then they get that opportunity to go into that internship at one of these desired locations.
It could be an air conditioning company, it could be Honeywell, it could be some kind of medical, physical therapy, something like that. And they actually get that hands-on internship where they're working in there.

**Celina Santana** (3:21)
They're working with all the hospitals at this point, so they'll also be working with probably engineering and biochemical companies at the same time. So that's my job is more or less to go and get those and go after those.
And be like, this is what's going on. We'd love to do internships. So I talk to a lot of mining companies at this point, and I actually talk to their engineering crew on the side point. And they just say, we've been trying to do this for a while. It's that disconnect. So therefore, I'm helping with that connect to make sure that that actually is a successful partnership.