Gwendolyn Rodriguez was a Senior Project Manager for New America’s Opportunity@Work program. Gwendolyn is an entrepreneur and strategy consultant passionate about creating opportunities and access for underrepresented populations. Prior to joining Opportunity@Work Gwendolyn co-founded Vialista, a tech platform for travelers to organize recommendations from their personal network, and consulted with various start-ups—operationalizing their ideas, developing talent, and defining their purpose and brand. Her most recent entrepreneurial experiment is to scale generosity through a virtual consulting and coaching network for social entrepreneurs.
Previously, Gwendolyn worked as a consultant in the public and private sectors with a focus on change management and partnership development to address social and business challenges. She is gifted at helping top management develop strategies for business growth and implementation throughout the organization and community. Gwendolyn also facilitated the Shared Youth Vision partnership for several states stemming from a federal mandate to better serve at-risk youth in the U.S. As a part of that effort in Rhode Island, she led a collaborative case management pilot that became a national model for increasing access to services for at-risk youth and streamlining service provision. She was instrumental in helping states replicate best practices collected from the pilot.
Gwendolyn holds an MBA from ESADE Business School in Barcelona and a BA from the University of Florida. Beyond her international professional experience, her passion for social and economic justice has fueled her advocacy efforts where she has facilitated robust dialogues and developed capacity building initiatives to improve the quality of life of members of her community.