Colleen Braga

When Colleen Braga enrolled her daughter in a Boys & Girls Club in California in the early 1990s, she was a struggling single parent looking for safe, affordable after-school care. She never imagined the organization would define the next three decades of her life — or that she would one day lead eight clubs of her own, feeding 200,000 children a year and reshaping the landscape of youth services in Ada County.
Braga, CEO of Boys & Girls Clubs of Ada County, is this year’s recipient of the ICON Award, a recognition of her more than 21 years of leadership in the Treasure Valley.
Her path to the nonprofit world was anything but conventional. A native of Anaheim, California, Braga entered the workforce straight out of high school, building her skills across insurance, technology, city government and mortgage banking. It was in that last field where a pivotal mentor, supervisor Victor Lundquist, recognized something in her that she hadn’t fully seen in herself.
“He saw my potential and helped me grow professionally by teaching me and giving me responsibility for important projects,” Braga said. “Because of him, I developed a sense of my own worth, abilities and competency.”
That foundation carried her into the nonprofit world in 1995, when she was hired as a fund development professional at a Boys & Girls Club — the same organization where her daughter was a member. Within a year, she was named CEO of the Boys & Girls Club of Placentia, California. A decade later, a phone call from an Ada County board chair changed everything. Thirty days after her interview, she was packed and moving to Idaho.
Since taking the helm in 2005, Braga has grown the organization from two clubs to eight, including a newly built facility in Kuna. Under her leadership, Boys & Girls Clubs of Ada County has become the largest provider of after-school meals in the state, serving roughly 200,000 meals per year. Graduation rates among club members continue to climb.
The growth hasn’t come without challenges. Braga navigated the organization through the COVID-19 pandemic, keeping clubs open as essential workers needed safe care options for their children — a decision that required both courage and logistical precision. Board member Lisa Tschamp, who nominated Braga for the award, said she watched her lead throughout the crisis “with enthusiasm, professionalism and grace.”
Braga also carries a challenge that she has worked to reframe as a source of wisdom rather than limitation: she doesn’t hold a college degree. She has leaned instead on mentorship and experience, citing research suggesting that only 10% of job success comes from formal education, while 70% comes from on-the-job learning.
“My advice to others is to know your worth and to not measure yourself with someone else’s ruler,” she said.
Her motivation has always been personal. The relief she felt as a young mother — knowing her daughter was safe, stimulated and cared for while she worked — is the same relief she now gives thousands of Ada County families.
“It has been a joy to work for the Club, and to give kids and their parents the same opportunities we were given,” she said.
As she looks toward retirement, Braga said she is eager for more time with her grandchildren — she is a mother of three and grandmother of two — but finds it difficult to imagine stepping away from work that has given her such purpose. Her husband Alan, the love of her life, passed away in 2022 after 30 years of marriage.
Her legacy, she hopes, will be measured not in square footage or meal counts, but in something harder to quantify.
“I hope that my legacy will be that I left the organization a little bit bigger and better than I found it,” she said.
By every measure, she already has.