Rainbow Labs co-founders Jacob Toups and Luis Vasquez are the Rams’ fourth ‘pLAymaker’ honorees – therams.com

Inspire change has a different meeting to each co-founder.

Vasquez, born and raised in East L.A. and a self-described “knucklehead” who had “very little direction,” said he doesn’t know how he made it out of high school. He served 12 years in the Navy, then returned home to coach and do other things in sports, and said he was “troubled,” being in the closet and not coming out until later in life. At first, he thought he could just keep it to himself and it wouldn’t get recognized by others, but is now embracing it.

“Now, I get to redefine masculinity, and I get to redefine what a gay man looks like, the gay Latino male looks like,” Vasquez said. “At the end of the day, if I can help just one person view themselves in a different lens, then that’s mic-drop for me. If I can do it in a community? Well then that’s even better. If I can start a change across different industries? Well then that’s really a life work.”

For Toups, inspiring change is figuring out how to activate people who don’t traditionally mentor in their community. By doing this, he hopes they feel changed and when they leave their program, they go volunteer elsewhere and build a generation of leaders in their community.

“There’s amazing folks who are doing it,” Toups said. “They’re really lost about, ‘How do I give back to my community?’ And so I’m really championing that mentoring can be something they can do, because a lot of the folks in our generation who are in their 30s and 40s never had a mentor in their life. And so now, we’re given the opportunity to turn around and actually be that mentor for kids.”