Rick is President and CEO of The Community College Foundation, a national nonprofit focused on improving communities through education.  He chairs the Advisory Board for the UC Davis School of Education, is Vice Chairman of Golden Pacific Bancorp, and a CalChamber board member.  He served three terms on Sacramento County’s Project Planning Commission, including nearly two years as its Chair, is a past president of the Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation, and chaired boards in the Sacramento region including the American Leadership Forum and the UC Davis Health System’s Leadership Council.  He has served on several other non-profit boards in Sacramento, including the Boys and Girls Club, the Urban League, United Way and People Reaching Out.  He was honored as Sacramento’s 2005 Humanitarian of the Year by United Cerebral Palsy, and was the MetroChamber’s 2010 honoree for the Peter McCuen Award for Civic Entrepreneurship.

Prior to his current job, Rick was a senior officer for USAA, a diversified financial services organization with more than 100 billion dollars of assets owned and managed for more than six million members.  Rick was the Regional Senior Vice President of USAA’s Western Region, which had included California, Alaska, Hawaii and Nevada, with more than 1 billion dollars of annual revenue.  Rick’s Air Force career included serving as the Deputy Inspector General of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, after having commanded the airlift wing which provided worldwide airlift for military patients and casualties.  A command pilot and space systems operations officer, his military decorations include the Legion of Merit, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, and a dozen Air Medals.

Rick’s education includes a BS degree in Physics from the University of Maryland and an MS in Political Science from Southern Illinois University.  He is a graduate of the Armed Forces Staff College and the National War College, a prestigious post-graduate program in national security management for senior government officials.  He is a distinguished graduate of the School of Mortgage Banking, earned the Chartered Property and Casualty Underwriter designation, and completed executive education programs at both the Darden and Wharton Graduate Schools of Management.