by: Hong Ta, Marketing and Communications Coordinator
With one year and 11 months of experience, I am the newest team member at SESEC. On the other hand, Michael Flor, our Associate Director, has been here for 10 years, which is quite a few, considering our organization is only 13 years old. He is retiring at the end of 2025 and has been laying the groundwork for his departure for a few years now. His retirement will make our current office dynamic a bit less intergenerational, and his presence will be greatly missed.
We held a retirement celebration for him on December 12, at which he received the SESEC Lifetime Achievement Award. If you were unable to make it, you can still sign his Kudoboard here!
A few months ago, I sat down with him for a coffee at Fresh Flours one morning and got the chance to speak to him about his career.
He started at the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition in 2015 as a grant writing and communications coordinator. He tells me it’s a “long story” when I ask how he joined the team. When he first applied, he had already been officially three years into retirement from a nonprofit career at the young age of 62, including multiple director positions at the National Asian Pacific Center on Aging, the International Community Health Services, and America’s Foundation for Chess. Looking at his impressive LinkedIn profile, I couldn’t help but notice his longest job tenure is at SESEC.
“A friend of mine made me aware of an opportunity at SESEC, but I wasn’t looking for a job. And she kept pestering me about, ‘Oh, you’d like it, you like it,’ and to get her off my back, I ended up applying for the position and got an interview,” he told me, “And then I remember coming home from the interview, thinking if I was offered the job, I really have no grounds to turn it down.”
Of course, he was officially offered the part-time position and, fortunately for us, did not turn it down. At the time, SESEC was sponsored by the Vietnamese Friendship Association (VFA), now known as Kandelia, and he was brought onto the team by then Executive Director Erin Okuno.
“I think just our working styles clicked really well. I walked into a position that felt so much less like work, but something that you’d really want to do,” he said to me nostalgically.
For the next couple of years, Michael would secure hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant funding for SESEC and become the full-time Associate Director. In late 2015, he oversaw the onboarding of Mindy, who was hired initially as a Rainier Valley Corp Fellow as a student, and later grew to become the Director of Community Advocacy Programs. In 2023, he was part of the hiring committee that hired Liz as our Executive Director, and Meghan, who began as an Operations Coordinator and upgraded to become the Director of Finance and Administration. Finally, in 2024, he and Liz hired me, which I assume to be a very good decision and reflective of his altruistic legacy.
In the middle of this tenure, the world entered lockdown in March 2020, and I was halfway through my freshman year of college. Then, stuck in my parents’ house, my worst problem was not having anything to do for a few weeks. Meanwhile, Michael was fighting for his life.
On March 4, 2020, Michael was admitted to Swedish Hospital, at the time, there were only 149 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the country. He ended up staying for 62 days; at one point, his situation deteriorated to the point where his family said their final goodbyes over the phone. They were told a call would come when he had died, but it never came, according to his wife, Elisa Del Rosario.
“His stubbornness finally served him well,” she told the Seattle Times.
Weeks later, he was released from the hospital and doesn’t even remember those goodbyes. The farewell he does remember was on May 5, 2020. During his release, over 50 doctors and nurses clapped as he left the building where he was expected to die.
“I’m back from the dead, and I can tell you,” he told the Times. “This will kick your ass.”
After getting to know Michael, I’m not surprised he defeated COVID-19. He has that type of old-school, tough-it-out mentality that often clashes with my Gen-Z work style. Whether subconsciously or not, while he was on that ventilator, he was definitely fighting in his own way.
At work, I still see him fight for Southeast Seattle students. He secured funding for our pilot Youth Leadership and Advocacy Program, which activates high schoolers in our area to work towards their own educational causes. The program is now in its fourth consecutive year.
His legacy in Seattle is prolific. He was born at Swedish Hospital, grew up in the Central District, attended O’dea High School, and graduated from the University of Washington. He served in the Navy in the middle of his undergraduate career, living in Hawaii. He also loves to travel and has been to more countries than he can count. He was the Gang of Four’s Bob Santos’ best man at his wedding with Representative Sharon Tomiko Santos, which he casually mentioned at work one day, much to my and the entire office’s surprise. Most importantly, he usually gave me half of his stir-fry beef from the Red Apple hot deli on the days he was feeling generous.
It’s time for Michael’s second and hopefully final attempt at retirement. Although I am personally counting down the days until I’m 62 years old and can access my well-earned Social Security benefits, Michael is well beyond that point in life. Most people who meet Michael cannot believe his actual age. He goes through life with such zest, acumen, and presence that his real age seems like a fib. If you are lucky enough to meet Michael, ask him his age – I guarantee you will be surprised!
I’ve known Michael the shortest amount of time on our staff. It might have been more befitting to have Mindy, who has known him for all ten years, or Meghan, who became his protege, or Liz, who he personally mentored to lead the organization, to write this tribute. But alas, in my role as the Marketing and Communications Coordinator, it fell upon me under my job description to maintain our blog posts and announcements. So here I am, writing what I hope to be a meaningful tribute to Michael Flor, our Associate Director, veteran, COVID-19 survivor, legacymaker, and favorite baby boomer in the SESEC office.
Now for the logistics. Want to contact Michael during his retirement? Here’s his LinkedIn. Plus, here’s who to contact in his absence.
- For operations questions, including billing, payments and financial issues – Meghan Bedell, Admin and Finance Director. [email protected]
- For Family Navigators Project- Geo Yang, UW Fellow, [email protected]
- For the Youth Leadership and Advocacy Project, SEED, APC and Data Cohorts – Mindy Huang, Director of Community Advocacy Programs. [email protected]
- For press contacts, marketing, social media – Hong Ta, Marketing and Communications Coordinator, [email protected].
- For all other grants, reports, and issues – Liz Huizar, Executive Director. [email protected]