Every search firm has a client list. Most of them are a logo wall. This is a story about one client, because the story is worth telling on its own terms and because of when it happened.
Stockton, 1990
Michael Tubbs was born in Stockton, California, on August 2, 1990. His mother was a teenager. His father was in prison, where he remains, serving a life sentence. Tubbs has written about all of this himself, in a memoir published in 2022 called The Deeper the Roots, so none of it is a revelation. It is simply where he started.
He went to Franklin High School in Stockton and came out of it into the International Baccalaureate program. Then Stanford, where he took a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and a master’s in Policy, Leadership and Organization Studies, finishing both in 2012. He was a Truman Scholar.
Stockton in those years was not an easy place to be from. The city filed for bankruptcy in 2012, the largest American city ever to do so at the time. It had one of the highest violent crime rates in the country. It was the kind of place that appeared in national coverage only as a cautionary tale.
Twenty-two years old, and on the council
In November 2012, the year he graduated, Tubbs ran for Stockton City Council in District 6 against a sitting incumbent. He won with 61.7 per cent of the vote and took office in January 2013, aged twenty-two.
Four years later he ran for mayor. In November 2016 he won with 70.6 per cent and took office on January 1, 2017, aged twenty-six. He was the first African-American mayor in Stockton’s history and the youngest mayor ever elected in any American city of more than 100,000 people.
Those are not close races. A city that had been written off elected a man in his twenties by margins most incumbents never see.
The idea that traveled
In February 2019 Stockton launched SEED, the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration. One hundred and twenty-five residents received five hundred dollars a month, with no conditions attached, for eighteen months. The three million dollar cost was privately funded.
The policy argument for guaranteed income had existed for decades. What had not existed was an American city willing to run it and publish what happened. Stockton did, and the findings traveled a great deal further than Stockton.
Tubbs went on to found Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, which had more than sixty participating cities by 2022. Whatever any individual thinks of the policy, an idea moved from the seminar room into sixty city halls, and it moved because one mayor of one bankrupt city was prepared to test it in public.
November 2020
He lost. In the November 2020 runoff, Kevin Lincoln beat him 57 to 43.
Here is why that date matters to us.
ExecSearches was conducting the Executive Director search for the Reinvent Stockton Foundation at the time, and Michael Tubbs was the Board Chair. The search ran from October 2020 through to February 2021. The election fell squarely in the middle of it.
We have run a great many searches, and we can tell you what usually happens when the person chairing the committee is in the middle of losing something. The meetings thin out. The replies slow down. The work gets handed to someone else, which is entirely human and nobody holds it against them.
That is not what happened. He kept showing up. The search continued through the election and through the defeat, and the foundation had its new Executive Director announced in February 2021.
For our part, the closing weeks of that search coincided with the Texas freeze, and this firm was working from Dallas with intermittent power and intermittent internet. Both sides of that engagement were dealing with something. The work still got done.
What happened next
In March 2021 Governor Gavin Newsom appointed him special adviser for economic mobility and opportunity. In 2022 he founded End Poverty in California. In 2026 he ran for Lieutenant Governor of California, was endorsed by the San Francisco Chronicle, and finished fourth in the primary.
He is thirty-six.
Why we are writing this
Because the way people behave when things are going badly tells you more than anything on their résumé, and we were in the room for it.
And because a good deal of what is written about executive search is about placements and fees, and almost none of it is about the clients, who are usually the more interesting party. The Reinvent Stockton Foundation was trying to do something serious in a city that needed it, and the person chairing that board was doing it while his own political career was ending.
We were glad to work for them. We would be glad to do it again.
More about him, his book and his organizations on our Michael Tubbs page. See also our Stockton and Central Valley nonprofit executive jobs guide.
ExecSearches has recruited executive leadership for nonprofit and mission driven organizations since 1999. If your board is beginning a search, we are easy to find.
