 In the early 1970s he worked with ASPIRA of New York, first as a Club Organizer and rising to the position of the Director of their Manhattan Center.This was during the period when Aspira of New York sued the NYC Board of Education, resulting the historic Aspira Consent Decree (1974) mandating transitional bilingual education programs for eligible Puerto Rican and other Latino students.During his graduate studies in Albany in the late 1970s, he worked as a teaching assistant and as a technical researcher with the Capitol District Regional Planning Commission.