Why Our Business Leaders Spent a Week Serving Away From the Business
- Rick Pina
- Jul 28
- 5 min read
Introducing #InspiredLife
From 17 to 26 July 2026, four members of the Inspired Solutions leadership team worked at a school campus in the Dominican Republic. They ran a five-day camp for 80+ children, taught English and trade skills, and handed out 1,000 backpacks filled with school supplies. They prayed over every child who received one.
This is the first post in #InspiredLife, a series about what our people do when nobody is buying anything. We talk a lot about our mission:
Inspire the world by providing diverse, innovative solutions with a customer-centric approach
Build a culture where our team members thrive
Help the business prosper
Make a global impact
That last phrase is easy to print on a wall. Here is what it looked like in July.
Who went
Four Inspired Solutions leaders were on the ground:
Isabella Pina, Chief Executive Officer, President, and Founder
Rick Pina, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Revenue Officer
Fatima "Desi" Almanzar, Executive Sales Operations Manager and Board Treasurer
Karen McCleary, Client Services Executive Coordinator and Board Secretary
Three of the four are Army veterans, and between them they served 71 years in uniform. Together the four carry a company P&L, our contract compliance portfolio, and our partner relationships. For one week in July, none of that was the job.
Getting there was not clean. 11 members of the wider mission team had flights canceled, Karen arrived a day behind schedule, and Rick spent Monday morning running airport shuttles between calls. Nobody went home.
The school
The campus is the RIPMINISTRIES Thelma Steward Destiny Academy, known locally as Academia del Destino. It sits next to Grace Destiny Church, and the lion painted at center court carries the verse the whole place is built on: 2 Timothy 1:9.
The academy serves 235 children from Pre-K through 9th grade, with 19 staff members and a hot meal every day. Most of the students are Haitian children of undocumented immigrants. That detail is the entire reason the school exists.
Rick shared the graduation numbers with our sales team the week of the trip:
United States: roughly four in five students finish high school
Dominican Republic: closer to one in two
Haitian children: single digits (5-8%)
The academy has set its goal at 100 percent high school graduation for every child enrolled. That gap is not a talking point. It is the assignment.
The week
The team was at the school by 9:00 AM every morning. The five-day camp taught English as a second language, and it also taught skills the students can turn into income: computer classes, bracelet making, soap making, cosmetology and makeup, dance, and barbering.
Basketball and soccer filled the afternoons. Desi and her daughter taught English on Monday morning, and Rick & Isabella's son worked as an assistant.
The rest of camp never showed up on a lesson plan. Kids came early. They stayed late. They put their arms around people they had known for three days.
The computer lab
The Destiny Academy school has a computer lab, and camp put it to work. Victoria Thompson ran what the team labeled the RIPM AI Lab. Students worked in small groups with laptops open and a six-step process written out on the whiteboard.
Watching a child learn a computer is one thing. Watching that same child use AI to make something is another. The students wrote their own stories, then used AlsonAI to turn those stories into illustrated books.
Two of those books are finished and headed to publication. We are printing them and sending the copies back to the children who wrote them.
Clairvens and the Winning Pass is one of them, written by Chingving Vincent. A fifteen-year-old defender makes the play of the championship match on a dirt field in the rain, with scouts watching. Then he passes the ball to the teammate who has struggled all season and lets him score the winning goal. Chingving was recognized for his creativity.
A school that serves a hot meal to 235 children every day now has students with published work to their name.
Backpack day
Thursday was backpack day. The team packed 1,000 bags with notebooks, pencils, sharpeners, and erasers; carried them into three of the poorest communities in the area, and gave them out by hand. Not shipped. Not dropped at a depot. Handed to a child, with a prayer over each one.
We distribute that way on purpose. When you put the bag in a child’s hands yourself, you cannot round the work down to a line item.
What the week cost
A week at the academy is not a week off. Isabella drove the company 8(a) annual review documentation to completion before she left, so nothing sat unsigned while she was gone. Rick ran the weekly sales team call from the Dominican Republic on 20 July, then left for the airport to collect the next group of arrivals.
The week landed in the middle of live work. Active pursuits, open collections, and a white paper were all moving. None of it paused. The four of them ran it from a school campus.
Why a federal IT company does this
Inspired Solutions is a for-profit government and commercial contractor. We deliver IT infrastructure, cybersecurity, and managed services to the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Air Force, the Army, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the General Services Administration, and a Fortune 500 commercial base.
Rick and Isabella Pina Ministries is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Inspired Solutions is the for-profit company that supports it.
Two separate entities, one set of convictions.
The trip still belongs on our company blog, and the reason is Isabella. She built this company on a conviction: you serve the communities where you live, work, and play. She wrote that conviction into how we operate.
Our values framework is ASPIRE: Accountability, Service, People-Centric, Integrity, Risk Management, Empowerment. Service is number two on purpose, and the commitment shows up in the operating model, not just the mission statement:
Volunteer time off. Every team member can earn two paid volunteer days a year by serving 50 hours with an approved 501(c)(3) and donating to it.
Local work too. Our Program Manager for Training and HR, Kim Hunt, runs a U.S.-based community organization that Inspired partners with.
Recent work: Inspired Solutions helped RIPMINISTRIES provide meals and toys to underprivileged families in Virginia and Missouri last year for Thanksgiving and Christmas. This is something we have been doing since the inception of the company.
Isabella has personally led mission teams to Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Mexico, Haiti, Dominica, and the Dominican Republic.
The rest of how we give back lives on our philanthropy page.
This is not a new program. Rick and Isabella founded the ministry in 2007, while still serving in uniform in the United States Army.
What this says about our culture
The Great Place to Work has certified Inspired Solutions for three consecutive years. In February 2026, our anonymous Trust Index came back at 94 percent against a 57 percent U.S. national average.
Those scores are not an accident of good benefits. Culture is what leadership does when there is no audit and no evaluator watching. In July, our CEO spent her week in a school kitchen and a classroom, our Board Treasurer taught English, and our Board Secretary poured her heart into child after child.
Our team sees that. So do our customers, our partners, and the people we are trying to hire.
How to be part of the next one
The academy runs on partners. Rick and Isabella Pina Ministries funds 235 children through a full school year, and that covers Christ-centered education, a daily hot meal, and a real shot at a diploma.
If you want to help fund a seat, go to ripministries.org. If you want to work somewhere that closes the laptop and gets on the plane, here is our careers page.
Next up in #InspiredLife: the work our team does in our own communities in the United States.
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