Management Science Graduate Devotes Career to Helping the Underrepresented

As a child in Newark, Sara Peña was captivated when Public Service Electric & Gas (PSEG) built a shiny glass headquarters in her city.

She visited the skyscraper often to translate as her mother, who spoke Spanish, paid the family’s energy bill.

Peña remembered those days when she applied to be PSEG’s director of external affairs.

“It brought tears to my eyes, because I, this little girl whose family sometimes didn't have enough money to pay the bill on the first floor, might now work on the top floor,” she said.

Peña has been doing exactly that since June 2022, when she joined PSEG to manage its relationships with elected officials.

“I was very moved by the position, because it involved not only being a liaison but being engaged in my community,” Peña said of the role that emphasizes PSEG’s values of constituent empowerment, ethical behavior and diversity and inclusion.

Peña has dedicated her career to that kind of service, providing a voice for those who feel powerless — something she experienced firsthand when starting Kean University as a first-generation American and college student working several jobs and taking a long, multiple-bus trip back and forth to Kean’s Union campus.

For a while, Peña worried that she didn’t belong and sometimes sat outside class, afraid to participate. But after fellow students helped her realize she wasn’t alone, she left home for Kean’s dorms, became a cheerleader and helped establish the school’s first multicultural sorority, Mu Sigma Upsilon.

It took her six years to earn her degree in management science in 1996, but she left Kean with a new confidence, applying her understanding of business as she launched a Community Development Department at Newark’s University Hospital and served as director of the Center for Hispanic Policy Research and Development under Governor Phil Murphy.

It was there that Peña met the Rev. Tiffany Williams Brewer, Esq., then deputy assistant secretary of state, with whom she later launched the Esther Institute for the Advancement of Women and Girls.

“Sara Peña is the consummate professional,” Brewer said. “She is consistently the first to volunteer and the first to finish with excellence. Her standard of excellence and infectious positivity empowers others around her to bring their best effort.”

Peña’s proudest accomplishment may be her Boys to Leaders Foundation, which she launched after learning that her son’s private school in Newark had put together a career day that didn’t include any Latino professionals. The organization brings boys together with leaders who look like them at a free annual conference that offers extra inspiration by convening on a college campus.

“It's about mentorship and the difference it can make,” said Peña, who also helped found the Roseville Community Charter School near her childhood home.

Peña said she couldn’t have done all of this without faith — not only in the divine, but in herself.

“The most important thing,” she said, “is simply to show up — not for anyone else, but for yourself.”