LifeChanger of the Year Nominee Profile

Chris Traina was nominated by a colleague, James Quinn.

Five years ago, Mr. Traina left an upwards-moving tech position at Apple to become a teacher. His mission was to inspire and make a positive impact on America’s future. Immediately after he left, Mr. Traina took a job teaching middle school science, starting mid-school year at a Title 1 low-income, high-crime community in a San Francisco Bay Area city called Vallejo.

The job presented a great challenge for Mr. Traina, but he welcomed it with positivity and creativity. Realizing that these at-risk students won't care how much he knows until they know how much he cares, Mr. Traina began a campaign to build bonds with his students. For example, even though this particular school district had no funds for a middle school sports program, he joined with community leaders to start a middle school basketball team.

"His classroom was always a safe place for students who had nowhere to go after school for homework and extracurricular activities. With experiences like turning pennies into gold, exploding gummy bears, exploding pumpkins, and launching rockets—Mr. Traina made science fun,' Quinn said. 

However, after teaching middle school science in Vallejo for four school years, Mr. Traina was ready for a new challenge: teaching continuation high school. During the summer before his new position, he co-founded the Project A.C.C.E.S.S. (Adaptive Curriculum Creating Economically Successful Students) program. While schools teach concepts of valuable subjects like mathematics, science, and English, the Science of Success is not taught—which is at the core focus of academia. This program’s goal is to coach students so that they can become high performance learners and doers.

"What better students to instill high performance than the high potential underperforming group of students found at a continuation high school?" Quinn said. "Mr. Traina’s students regularly schedule one-on-one sessions to receive his professional, breakthrough coaching sessions, which he provides for his students at no cost. In these sessions, students are able to connect with their identity and their potential. Most importantly, in these sessions, they are able to identify the barriers that prevent them from breaking through to the next level." He then designs experiments to overcome those barriers.

Mr. Traina is also the founder and CEO of the Teachers Deserve More Foundation. Currently, America is facing a teacher shortage, and the statistics show that the situation is getting worse. As such, his foundation’s mission is to reverse the trend of teacher shortage by making it the most desirable occupation for college students to consider when deciding their first step out of school.

"One of Mr. Traina's goals is to help every teacher in America buy a home. He has already taken strides in this area and couldn’t be more excited for the future to come," Quinn said.

Mr. Traina is a motivational speaker whose speeches have been seen by over 60,000 people, an entrepreneur, a philanthropist, a real estate agent, a husband, and a father. However, at the core of all of it, he is a teacher with the purpose to positively change lives.

"As a teacher myself, I have received first-hand mentoring from Mr. Traina that I have been able to immediately implement into my third-grade classroom. Because of Mr. Traina, I have grown not only as an educator, but also as a person."  Quinn said. "Since he clearly is a leader with a record of excellence who proves to make a beneficial difference in students’ lives each school day by increasing rigor and school cultures as a whole, I can proudly nominate Mr. Traina for LifeChanger of the Year."

Chris in the News

Pittsburg Hopes to Attract Teachers with Affordable Housing - CBS San Francisco
Teachers Deserve More Foundation