Specialty Areas:

• Assistance with Board of Directors

• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

• Fundraising & Development

• Communications & Refreshed Images, Community Engagement

• Strategy& Organizational Development

• Meeting Facilitation

Cynthia N. Cortez specializes in leading strategic efforts to help organizations reach diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. Her career is composed of various inaugural roles in both higher education and nonprofit sectors. Her unique specialty is in leading organizational transformation by founding and redefining new offices and units as well as designing, implementing, and evaluating equity-focused programs and initiatives. Excellence is her love language and as a result, her career has grown via continuous recruitment for her approach, skills, and personality. She has worked at UC Berkeley, Occidental College, Bresee Foundation, the SELA Collaborative, and UC Merced in roles ranging from Parent Coordinator to Deputy Chief Diversity Officer.

Committed to personal and professional growth, she is also an alumnus of various leadership development programs such as Education Pioneers, PropelNext, Project Evident, and Dr. Yasmin Davidds Multicultural Women Executive Leadership Program. Cynthia utilizes both her undergraduate and graduate school studies to re-imagine what a more just, equitable society can look like. She earned a BA from UC Berkeley in Peace and Conflict Studies focused on Human Rights and Sustainable Economic Development in Latin America and holds a MA from UCLA in Social Research Methodology with a focus on Program Evaluation Theory.

Cynthia firmly believes in the liberatory power of spiritually-anchored self authorship and self awareness. She advocates for reflective practices at different levels of management–organizational and individual–to blend the rational mind with the emotional heart. Her experiences as a single mother, Honduran American, Northeast Los Angeles native, first generation professional, and modest means background has yielded values in integrity, excellence, opportunity, accountability, rest, and spirituality. When not immersed in literature reviews and journal articles, Cynthia studies medicinal plants and healing modalities such as prayer, exercise, tea drinking, and journaling.