Amanda Fernandez

Amanda Fernandez

2016 Ricardo Salinas Scholar, Ricardo Salinas Scholarship

Amanda Fernandez (Belmont, Massachusetts) has 25 years of experience in the areas of recruiting, diversity, organization development, change management, strategic planning and Latino community relations.

Amanda Fernandez (Belmont, Massachusetts) has 25 years of experience in the areas of recruiting, diversity, organization development, change management, strategic planning and Latino community relations. She has recently founded Latinos for Education, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to develop, place and connect essential Latino leadership in the education sector.

Prior to this, she was the Vice President of Latino Community Partnerships at Teach for America, where she developed relationships with national Latino serving organizations to advance recruitment of Latino teachers and support Latino alumni.  Her work supported the organization in achieving almost triple growth in Latino teachers to the corps in five years. She also led efforts internally focused on Latino leadership development and supported the growth of Latinos on staff from 6% to 10%.  Amanda also launched the first program in the country and across sectors to actively recruit undocumented college graduates with Deferred Action Status (DACA) and grew this program from 2 to 100 teachers in two years.

Amanda was a Director at The Bridgespan Group where she served as an organizational consultant to youth and education clients in support of their strategic planning efforts. In this capacity she also developed HR tools that have been widely utilized by nonprofit organizations nationally.

Amanda was a Director of Organization Development for Hudson, a global staffing and human capital firm, where she launched a diversity consulting services division. She spent seven years at Deloitte, an international professional services firm, where she focused on human capital consulting projects primarily in merger and acquisition environments and diversity programs for Deloitte staff nationally.

Over the course of her professional career, Amanda has been a frequent speaker at conferences and events. She is a blogger on Huffington Post Latino Voices, and has been featured in Poder Magazine’s list of movers and shakers. She currently serves on the KIPP Massachusetts, Achieve Mission, Roxbury Community College boards and the RISE Colorado advisory board. El Planeta named her one of the 100 most influential Hispanics in Massachusetts. Amanda holds an M.S. from Fordham University and lives in the Boston area with her spouse and two children. (Participated in the Resnick Aspen Action Forum in Aspen, Colorado in July 2016.)