About Joe Santoro, Founder

Joe Santoro is an entrepreneur and philanthropist who is also devoted to his family and fellow Americans. Joe created the Santoro Education Lifeskills Foundation (SELF) with a sincere passion for helping people become their best selves. 

Throughout his career building businesses, Joe worked with people from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and roles. Through these interactions, he identified the personal and interpersonal skills essential for people to reach their full potential. He quickly recognized that the earlier in life these skills are learned, the better prepared a person is to win the biggest game -- life.

He found these skills had a name: Emotional Intelligence, or social/emotional skills, but he prefers to call them essential personal life skills.

This led Joe to continually ask the question:  Since employers need employees who have these skills, and since parents want their children to get good jobs, why are we not teaching all students these skills routinely like its own subject alongside academic subjects?

Today, Joe continues to use his skillsets and business accomplishments through this foundation to promote essential personal life skills education for ALL children, which should begin with quality early learning for every child when those skills begin to develop, and extend through grades K-12 as a routine part of school curriculum for every student in our nation.

Joe has also advocated for many years for our government to reduce wasteful spending, to make government smaller, and to invest in all Americans with quality early learning for all children and essential personal life skills curricula in all schools from K-12th grades.  When a company reduces waste, it looks at how it can reduce debt and improve goods and services.  Joe believes that the same should be true of our government and that if they reduce the budget, they should invest saved funds on all Americans.  He also believes that our nation needs to get back to its manufacturing roots so we are not at risk of foreign entities having too great a market share in U.S. interests; additionally, outsourced overseas manufacturing of American goods leaves America at risk of supply chain disruptions, such as those seen during the COVID pandemic. 

Through a collaboration with universities and other organizations that deal with essential personal life skills, Joe also helped produce 90 tips for coping with life in difficult and stressful times. These tips are found on this website in the TIPS FOR COPING WITH HARD TIMES tab of the WE EDUCATE page above.