Professional Experience:
My background is a bit different than other candidates, but my experience in both the social and private sector will make me a fantastic partner.
Although very successful in my consultative sales career, my passion has always been where I started – in the social sector, empowering people to overcome economic and social challenges. I have highlighted some of my key strengths and experience:
- Developing and executing on strategy: It doesn’t matter whether you are the CEO of a company or community leader, it is vital to creating a plan based off of understanding root causes, gaps in success, needs assessments, and business/personal outcomes. My current role involves me becoming a trusted advisor to senior business leaders in the private sector to develop and execute on their growth strategies. I can do that successfully because I spent over three years developing and implementing strategic plans in Latin American communities to empower women, youth and agricultural workers.
- Deep Understanding of International Development: I graduated with Honors with an applied business degree in International Development. Throughout my four year degree, I did four contract positions within four different NGO’s to develop strategic plans, fundraise, develop grants and most recently worked on a contract developing local procurement strategies for a global mining organization. My career began working within Latin American communities to understand their challenges and generate actionable recommendations to overcome them through education and economic opportunity. Today I can help supply chain/procurement leaders link their processes to sdgs and value chains.
- Leadership and Mentor Skills: I have always enjoyed working with people, enabling them to succeed and seeing people grow. I am currently a mentor for new hires at Gartner which allows me to coach them, develop their skills, be a sounding board and challenge their thinking. I have led various teams through seemingly impossible situations, in cross-cultural environments, navigating political positions and how to individually succeed. Working in hospitality has given be the interpersonal and soft skills to recognize people’s strengths and gaps while maintaining my composure and positive attitude.
- Project Management & Development: I lived in Latin America for over seven years and during that time I partnered with local organizations on various economic development initiatives. The first couple of years were spent empowering agricultural workers through education on climate change, crop rotation, water methods and alternative farming methods that allowed them to sustain their livelihoods year-round and gain some economic prosperity. The last couple of years, I partnered with local municipalities on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica and Panama to build an organization to invest in women and youth. Due to the rise in tourism as well as the drug trade, women and youth were finding very few viable opportunities