A conversation with Monica Mapa, Associate Director of Marketing and Strategic Communications, and 2025 Founder’s Day Award recipient.
Tell me about how you got to UCSF? What made you want to be a part of this team?
My first introduction to UCSF was through my childhood friend, Gail Mametsuka, who retired as the director of Fitness and Recreation. Prior to that, when she started her career at UCSF, she started a group called EMPACT! Employee Activities and Community, the precursor to Arts and Events.
They had a monthly newsletter, which I wrote in exchange for a free membership at Millberry Union Fitness Center. I would do stories and interviews and go to some of their work events. I thought, this is really cool, that there's a group that does this for UCSF.
Fast forward, I was working for a series of startups. The last startup I was in closed overnight, so I was freelancing. And then that same friend [Mametsuka] said, “Hey, we're looking for a person who knows how to do marketing communications.” So, UCSF hired me as a consultant for a year to put together a communications and marketing plan for what was known as Programs and Services at that time.
At the same time, the Associate Vice Chancellor at the time, Stella Hsu, saw what was happening and said, “This is our opportunity, with the opening of Mission Bay, to get clear about what we want to call ourselves.” We wanted to be invited to the table when big decisions were being made at the university, so we needed to reimagine who we are.
Part of my consulting year was to do an exhaustive marketing study that included a naming and branding project, which resulted in what you know today as our value proposition, ‘Making Life Better Here’.
We went from ‘Campus Auxiliary Services’ to ‘Campus Life Services’. Then, I started building the CLS Marketing team. Suzie Kirrane [Digital Experience Strategist] was the art director. There were two other graphic designers. There were no project managers. We were really, really small. Whoever showed up at the door first got their stuff done. It really was a mom-and-pop shop.
The rebranding and renaming gave us a system upon which to grow, something to aspire to. I said, “Well, you have an opportunity to be a great brand here, so here’s a program that I think you should follow.”
Everything that happened five to ten years later in the development of the brand team at UCSF happened here at CLS first.
Reggie Sparks [Creative Director, CLS Marketing] was part of that, so I want to give him credit. Suzie [Kirrane] was my first creative partner; she should get credit for that as well.
Rutter before it was built featuring Al, Tracey, Steve, Alan, Wayne, Gail, Jen and Monica Mapa. (Photo credit: Jennifer Dowd)
Did you ever imagine that you’d be here for this long?
Never. It was a recession, and all the dotcoms that had no product or couldn't get venture capital money. This impacted my industry in advertising. I said, “I'm just going to wait this out and go back.”
But what happened was that I saw how healthy everyone was around me at UCSF; they all went home on time, and they didn't work too many nights, and they could go to the gym during the day. I saw that wellness and their health were baked into the culture here, and that was really hard to beat after having been in advertising, which was mean and cutthroat, not very healthy.
What was one turning point in your career where you started to think of UCSF as where you belong and where you wanted to be long-term?
The turning point was when Campus Life Services came up with a leadership program called the Leadership Development Program (LDP).
They made us take all these courses as a group, including finance and accounting. It was like an accelerated CLS version of an MBA school, and at the end, they sent us to customer service and leadership management training at Disneyland, which was super.
We came back, and they said, now the first cohort has a year to come up with a project to implement at UCSF. Our project became the Quality Service Program, which we're trying to bring back now as part of the return to site.
Part of my initial brand program for CLS was to do service training, even before I did the Disney training. Your frontline staff needs to represent the brand, not just the leadership. It really starts from the front and goes all the way to the top. It has to be equal, especially when you're saying something like ‘Making Life Better Here’.
You have to set up your organization to live with what that means and it has to be very clear to everyone in the organization exactly what that means. The Quality Service program was born out of the practicum. Everybody had to take it from the AVC down to the parking attendant, so that everybody uses the same decision tree every day as part of their job, which was to be of service.
The first cohort of the Leadership Development Program at their Customer Service Training in Disneyland.
Considering you received the Chancellor’s Award for Exceptional University Service, what does ‘exceptional’ mean in the scope of your work? How do you strive to create exceptional output?
I would never call myself exceptional at anything. I think what we’ve done as a team is exceptional. What’s exceptional is creating environments where people feel heard, people feel empowered, and I think where people feel that even their leaders or their supervisors, or their managers, are teachable. I sometimes say, ‘stay curious’, because you can't know everything at once.
I think exceptional service is creating environments where people can evolve, understand why they're there, what they're accountable for, and whom they're accountable to. It's about creating an environment for growth, new challenges, and creativity.
Ultimately, a leader gathers input but then has to make the ultimate decision. So hopefully, you are gathering inputs from experienced, smart people, maybe even smarter than you, people with different perspectives. I think that's why diversity matters, all sorts of diversity.
What has UCSF taught you about being a good leader?
You can't do it by yourself, ever, ever. And it's never about you.
You do the best you can to inspire people, knowing that no one size fits all. You learn how to pay attention to the strengths of your team and what inspires them. You have to have empathy and vulnerability.
You need to be clear and clear about what is at stake, what the goal is, and what each person's strengths are in making that happen and then set them free.
One more thing a leader is to me is kind, be firm and clear without having a person walk away feeling bad about who they are. I can't think of one reason why you would ever want somebody to feel small.
This makes me think also about the way that you do performance reviews, you refer to them as “giving people their flowers”. Can you talk a little bit about your philosophy and why you do performance reviews that way?
We all work really hard. We're all really talented in our own way. I'm really proud of everybody and I want my team to know that at any given time, how proud I am of them.
I think it really does mean something when somebody says to you, “I'm proud of you”, or “I think you did a good job on this”.
I don't ever want anyone on that team to lose sight of how much I appreciate them and how much I appreciate their effort. That shouldn't be a secret.
A lot of the work we do at Campus Life Services is instrumental in supporting the campus staff, learners, and visitors. Can you share a moment when you really saw and felt the impact of your work?
Yes, Documents and Media got a call from this teeny, tiny clinic called the UCSF Health and Human Rights Initiative (HHRI), which offers pro bono medical and psychological forensic affidavits for immigrants. They needed a flyer and copy to help seek donors and private funding in the event that their funding was cut off.
The HHRI got their clients referred by immigration attorneys for people who were seeking asylum. They developed a forensic questionnaire that would document the physical, mental, psychological impacts of abuse, torture—things that would make you want to flee your country, right? Their ultimate goal was to make this intake the global standard so that one could hold governments, individuals, and countries liable for the harm that they caused people.
One of the designs Mapa's team worked on for the UCSF Health and Human Rights Initiative.
When I took this call and heard the mission, I said, “I think I need to bring in my team on this one,” because I realized it wasn't just a flyer. So, I brought in Reggie [Sparks] and Tracy Long [Project Manager, Print and Design], and at the end of the Zoom meeting our jaws were all on the floor, we couldn't believe this.
There was a stat: if you apply for asylum and you don't have a lawyer, the chances of getting a decision are zero. Zero to one, maybe. If you get a lawyer to represent you, it goes up a little bit more. If you have a health forensic affidavit that documents the impacts of torture on your body and your psychology, which is a legal document now, you have a 99.7% acceptance rate.
Their work actually helped people fleeing conflict areas. We were just practically crying. Because we're like this, we work with UCSF. We're making a brochure, and we may never meet these people. I said, “I don't care what this costs. This one's pro bono today.”
I didn't even have to ask, we just kind of looked at each other like, we're doing this, it doesn't matter if we have to do it for free, we're doing it. I really felt the impact of that.
Who is someone who has been instrumental in your career growth at UCSF?
There are a lot of people! When I first started, I would say Barbara Jones and Dr. Kathleen Brown, two African American women, were my mentors at UCSF.
They were quietly strong, passionate women, great leaders, polarizing sometimes, in their decisions, in a good way. That's how you know that they're strong leaders.
They could see that I was like a deer in the headlights. They took a liking to me, and we would have lunch every few months. They would really encourage me to apply for jobs that I felt I had no right to. Now, looking back, I had every right, and they saw something in me. Actually, what they saw was me making myself small to fit in.
And as two of the highest-ranking black women on campus, you don't get into a world-class university as a woman of color as a leader by making yourself small.
Mapa poses with members of CLS Marketing Team at the Rutter Center.
What accomplishments are you most proud of in your time at UCSF?
That I was really good at F45, for like five minutes. That was hard!
What I’m really proud of is that we've never varied from making life better here, and that's kind of stuck around. It's something you can never really arrive at. You're constantly aspiring to, and it allows our organization to evolve.
I am also proud of creating a body of work that confirms that marketing communications is an area of knowledge and expertise that benefits not only our organization, but UCSF as a whole. I think that this work has instilled an appreciation for marketing and public relations, storytelling, and disciplined advertising.
Also honoring the people that were along for the ride, as we kind of groped our way through the dark to where we are now, where people know what we do, and they value it.
The work of a lifetime is creating a team that's so high functioning and so valued that it doesn't need me anymore.
What do you hope continues after you have moved on from UCSF?
That people fill out the Creative Services Request form and honor the protocols in place. Fill out the form!
Universities like UCSF have been impacted by funding cuts to research. What advice can you offer around persisting through challenging moments like these?
As much as you're able, play the long game. Around 2009 and 2010, there was another economic downturn that lasted for a while. It was sad. It was a dark time, and it felt like it was going to last forever.
This is kind of similar to that. It's pretty bleak. Maybe the details are different, but we wonder, how could we ever come up from this? Is there another side?
The great thing about UCSF is that we do play the long game. Research takes decades before you come to an answer, and we support research, and we support the slow evolution of innovation that doesn't happen overnight.
We have to remember what we stand for. If we stick together, we'll roll through it.
I’ve been at UCSF for more than 20 years. I know they'll figure this out. I know that universities across the country will band together. I believe in the goodness of everyone.
I don't know how that's going to play out, and maybe it will be hard for a little while longer before it gets good again, but you see the patterns in history, you cannot keep good people down.
You can’t squelch acceptance, love, and caring; you cannot.
Mapa stands alongside Chancellor Sam Hawgood and the 2025 Founders Day Award Recipients
What is next? What are you looking forward to in … the next chapter?
Turning off my alarm! Never, ever have I ever been a morning person. And then you know, what's going to happen is that I'm going to start waking up naturally at 5 a.m.…
I have a couple of writing goals I've set for myself that I've been planning for and working on for the last five years.
I’m working on a novel influenced by my parents. They're World War II survivors. My dad came from a society family, and they lost everything. The book explores how that impacted generations out.
There's a little bit of San Francisco in there from my childhood. There's a lot of his childhood in there. But I realized that in writing it, if I stick to the truth, it's really kind of a boring story. So, I'm working on dismantling the truth and really making it a nice piece of fiction.
I'd also like to see more of the world and just write about that. I find people just so fascinating. Then you put language on top of that, and put culture on top of that, and food on top of that, wow! I want to see more of that and live the creative life.
Anything else you want to share?
I'm going to miss you guys. I think you guys are amazing and I can't wait to see what you guys come up with next as a team. So, keep me in the loop!
