Hi Reader
We were taught that dignity lives in what we can give.
Almost no one taught us the other half.
This week on Reframing Perspectives, I sit down with Miguel Centeno — Vice President of Community Engagement at Healthfirst, the largest not-for-profit health insurer in downstate New York, serving more than two million New Yorkers. But Miguel's story doesn't start in a boardroom. It starts in Bronx public housing, in an apartment that often went without heat or hot water, and in a family who gave him a lesson he's carried into every room since:
You don't need dollars to have dignity.
And then the reframe he's spent twenty years teaching back to the rest of us:
There is also dignity in accepting help.
Miguel's life was shaped, again and again, by people who chose to invest in him — including a guardian angel named Susan Luger, who prepared him and his sister for the entrance exams that opened doors his parents didn't know existed. He knows what it costs to receive. And he knows what it gives.
A few of the moments we sit in:
- The walk down a steep hill to the public bus, while his classmates climbed into private ones — the two-worlds dance so many of us know
- The guidance counselor who told him to "be more realistic" about Columbia, and the family voice that pushed him through anyway
- A morning at a Bronx family homeless shelter, when one question — "Where would you prefer to live?" — returned dignity to a family in a single sentence
- Why we do well by doing good — and the one thing he's certain AI can never replace
This is a conversation for every changemaker who carries the weight of the work, and every leader who needs the reminder that the people on the other side of it are human first.
A question to sit with this week:
Where in your life are you letting pride get in the way of the help that could carry you closer to your purpose?
