Chief Executive Officer at UPAC
At Blair Search Partners, we believe meaningful leadership is rooted in the ability to bring people together around a shared purpose. Through our Project Impact series, we spotlight leaders whose work strengthens organizations, deepens community connection, and creates lasting impact far beyond the walls of the institutions they serve.
Today, we are proud to feature Wendy Urushima-Conn, Chief Executive Officer of UPAC. Following a search led by Blair Search Partners, Wendy was selected to lead the organization after the retirement of Margaret Iwanaga Penrose, a civil rights leader who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and guided UPAC for roughly three decades. With a career spanning broadcast television, business advocacy, and some of the hardest human-services work there is, Wendy brings a conviction that community is built one person at a time.
Meet Wendy
Ask Wendy what connects a career this varied and she doesn’t hesitate. “I wake up every day and I’m like, how do I make someone’s life brighter?” she says. “I’m a big believer in making people feel seen, heard, and supported.”
That instinct took shape at KGTV / 10News, where she spent more than 13 years leading community affairs while also appearing on air as a weather and traffic reporter. When she left, the pull toward the nonprofit sector was simple. “I really wanted to do something to help people,” she says.
The turning point had come in 2004, when her first husband passed away unexpectedly and she was widowed at just 36 years old. Three years later she left television for the domestic violence field at the Center for Community Solutions, and founded a scholarship in her late husband’s memory to send students to college. What followed was a series of taps on the shoulder she couldn’t refuse: the Asian Business Association, where she’d served on the board for two decades, and then the Epilepsy Foundation — a recruitment led by Trevor Blair, at the very moment her own daughter was being evaluated for epilepsy. “This is meant to be,” she remembers thinking. She led the foundation for eight years. Her daughter is living well with epilepsy today.
Answering the Call
When community leaders began calling her about UPAC, Wendy’s first answer was no. “I love what I’m doing,” she told them, offering instead to help find the right person. Then she got on the Zoom for a first interview with BSP and UPAC and knew there was something more to explore.
In that first conversation, her own advice caught up with her. “If you know you have skills that can help UPAC, you need to offer to help. Now is the time. It’s a pivotal point for the community and for the world.”
She arrived at UPAC in a crucial moment. Two long-tenured leaders were retiring — CEO Margaret Iwanaga Penrose and CFO Annette Phan — and the organization was carrying a roughly million-dollar deficit. A year later, working alongside a new CFO and the organization’s existing COO, UPAC is fiscally solvent. “A lot of nonprofits are having those challenges,” she says, “but we’re doing incredibly well.”
The wins have kept coming. UPAC was recently awarded a $28 million, five-year Intensive Case Management grant that they are calling Journey to Wellness, in partnership with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) to serve adults with severe mental health challenges. A $50,000 Lotus grant from The San Diego Foundation is funding AANHPI youth working with other youth. And Wendy has rebuilt the board almost from the ground up, deliberately diversifying it to reflect everyone the organization serves.
Erasing the Stigma
Founded in the 1970s, UPAC — historically the Union of Pan Asian Communities — is rebranding as Uniting People Across Cultures, a name that better fits an organization whose staff speak more than 30 languages and whose reach extends well beyond the API community. Wendy describes the organization’s work as multicultural behavioral health: mental health services, a substance use program, even a problem gambling intensive outpatient program. Much of it carries stigma, especially across the cultures UPAC serves. “Mental health, substance use, violence — it happens in all communities, across all income levels,” she says. “And when that happens in a family, it happens in the community.”
Within her first week as CEO, one program showed her she’d made the right choice and moved her to tears. UPAC’s Community Violence Response Team goes where few others do. When an act of violence happens in the county like a shooting, a murder, the kind of thing that flashes across the evening news, law enforcement goes in to do their job, and UPAC’s counselors, most of whom carry lived experience of their own, go in to do something else. Available around the clock, they meet a grieving family where they are, walk alongside them, help them toward counseling when the time is right. “It made me cry my first week here, which is when I knew I’m in the right place,” she says. “It’s hard, but every day we’re helping someone.”
If there’s a piece of the mission she’s determined to fix, it’s visibility. “Part of the API culture is you don’t toot your own horn,” she says. “I’m like, no — people need to know we exist. We’re going to raise awareness.”
The BSP Difference: Reach the Job Boards Can’t Match
Wendy has sat on enough boards and in enough CEO groups to have watched organizations try to run searches on their own and her advice is unequivocal. When your leader leaves, don’t do it yourself. She learned it the hard way once, hiring for a fundraising role without a search firm and drowning in some 3,000 applications.
What a firm like BSP brings is reach and judgment the job boards can’t. “Blair Search Partners will actually go out and find the right person. They know who the players are.” She credits Trevor Blair’s roots in the industry and the team’s finger on the pulse knowing not just who’s qualified, but who might move, and whether the salary range is even right. For UPAC, at a moment when two anchor leaders were retiring at once, “BSP helped seal the deal.”
“What made Wendy the right choice was the very thing that made her hesitate — she cared more about UPAC finding the best person than about landing the role herself. That instinct to put the community first is exactly what this moment called for. From our earliest conversations, it was clear she wouldn’t just lead UPAC; she’d champion it,” said Katie Do, Client Services Director at Blair Search Partners.
Mindset by the Mile
To understand how Wendy leads through hard seasons, it helps to know she runs ultramarathons — 32, 50, 100 miles, with 102 her farthest. She didn’t start running until her 40s. Somewhere around mile 50 of a race across the desert, with 12 miles still to go, she wanted to quit. Then she thought of the people she runs for: someone with epilepsy who can’t leave the house without a helmet, her father going through cancer treatment. “Keep going,” she told herself. “I don’t have to do this, I get to.”
The perspective carries straight into the CEO seat. She walked into a deficit and contracts getting cut left and right, and lost plenty of sleep her first year. But for Wendy, challenges are just opportunities. “Half of it is mindset,” she says.
Looking Ahead
Wendy has been named Woman of the Year for the State of California — an honor her own mother once received — and one of the National Diversity Council’s most powerful and influential women in the state, the recognition she holds closest. Coming up as a young female executive of color, “I didn’t see a lot of people who looked like me.” As the first Asian American to lead her 116-year-old Rotary club, she thinks constantly about what comes after her. “How do we pave the way,” she asks, “for anyone who says, can I do that?”
She is proof of her own answer. “I lost a husband. I was widowed at 36. I had a daughter with epilepsy who I wasn’t even sure would be able to drive or live independently. But it’s all possible. Life is hills and valleys, it’s just what you make of it.” And she gives the credit away. An award, she says, “is really a reflection of everybody else doing the work.”
Your Next Opportunity Starts Here
We are so proud to celebrate Wendy and her incredible leadership at UPAC. Her story is a testament to what happens when the right leader meets the right moment. Congratulations, Wendy!
If you’re an organization striving to make a difference by hiring a team of changemakers, or an individual looking for your next career move in the nonprofit sector, visit us at blairsearchpartners.com and let’s see what we can do together. We’d love to help you find your next great hire.