For years, Portland was a favorite vacation destination for Hazel Valdez and friends. They enjoyed the city so much that the group made a pact to eventually move here. By 2012, Valdez followed through, packing up and moving to the Rose City from Phoenix.
Why the Pacific Northwest?
“First and foremost was the food scene in Portland,” she said. “As a chef in my other life I thought well that’s a great place to be, I can start a food truck business. It didn’t work out like I had hoped.”
Valdez did stay connected to the food scene, consulting with small restaurants on using social media and digital marketing. That led her to the nonprofit Portland Women in Tech, where she started as a volunteer before landing full-time work. In late 2022, she was named executive director of the organization. We caught up to talk about Valdez’s journey to PDXWIT.
You have a degree from Le Cordon Bleu. Tell me about your relationship to food and cooking. My relationship to food and cooking has really stemmed from my Filipino heritage, its hospitality. When we had company the first words out of my mom’s mouth would be “have you eaten?” I share that type of welcoming. It’s an ethos similar to how the Filipino chefs in town have really shared our culture and helped the Filipino food scene become a reality. The other half of that was I entered culinary school. Some folks have a midlife crisis and they buy a car or something crazy. I decided, well, I’ve always wanted to go to culinary school.
How do you think your restaurant and culinary training translate to your current work? For me, the bridge for a lot of things in my life deals with how we can bring people together and food is a really big driver for me. With PDXWIT on a bigger scale, it’s all about community. How do we get each of these communities, that at some point just kind of stay in their lanes and never really expand, (together). When I was hired I talked about how PDXWIT needs to open its doors and define tech more broadly. As we speak you and I are using a telephone that was created, manufactured, produced and distributed by way of tech. And that’s where we are right now, being able to collaborate more.
You and your wife are boxers. How did you get into boxing? When we first got to Portland we wanted to get into a healthier lifestyle. And boxing provides that for us. We box out of McConnell’s Boxing Academy. Lo and behold, our coaches are two-time World Champion Molly McConnell and (in a serendipitous twist) Denise McCarty, (McConnell's) wife, who is also in the tech world. We box predominately for health reasons but honestly, the other part of that is it’s also a community.
Tell me about that. In this community we have boxers from all walks of life that come through these doors and are accepted for who they are and they aren’t going to the gym to look pretty. We’re there to work out...you need to hit a bag or get out of here. I sparred a bit in the beginning and learned how to do that. The reason to learn how to spar was to understand the mechanics and the science of boxing but (also) to translate it into things like how do you work through a problem when it’s a one-on-one issue, or you get hit and you need to do a counter punch. What does that look like? It’s like chess, it’s what’s my next move.
Do you draw on that in other parts of life? Yeah. Boxing is a solo sport. You get the training and then you’re put into a ring. That ring is life. You have to make moves that — and not in a bad way — benefit you. You choose the directions that you’d like to go toward and move toward. Goal setting is part of that. And, boxing is a really great stress reliever.
Closer Look
Hazel Valdez
Title: Executive director of Portland Women in Tech
Hometown: San Fernando la Union, Philippines until age 5; Long Beach, California
Education: Bachelor’s in English, University of California at Irvine; B.A. in management, Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts; Oregon Bioscience Association workforce training certifications
Boards/volunteer work: Saturday Academy; McConnell’s Boxing Academy; U.S.A. Boxing judge
Currently reading: “Living Forward,” by Michael Hyatt, Daniel Harkavy
Current shows: “Last of Us,” “Vikings: Valhalla”
Go-to Portland restaurant: Nong’s Khao Man Gai
