Maria Rogers Pascual
Template:TOCnestleft Maria Rogers Pascual
Background
"When I was 3 years old my mother and father moved our entire family (all 7 of us) from Lafayette, Louisiana to Cuernavaca, Mexico. For my father, Cuernavaca was a place where he could be himself amongst other artists. For my mother who was a refugee all of her life (from Franco’s Spain, to Stalin’s Russia, to Trujillo’s Dominican Republic…), Mexico felt like the closest thing to home. For me, Mexico was home. My political consciousness awakened at age 13, when my family moved to Austin, Texas. In the midst of my struggles to find my identity, I began to notice that in some settings I had privilege and in others I didn't. I was a little gringa in Mexico, a Mexican in the US, a White girl in my African American neighborhood and a Mojada (wetback) to Chicanos. Needless to say, I learned something about being “different” and “falling through the cracks.” This experience fed my curiosity with what it means to live in the in-between spaces, and what it takes to show up in the world from that place.”
Maria is a consultant, trainer and Leadership coach. She works with community-based organizations, collaboratives and private foundations that invest in community empowerment as a primary means to social change. Maria brings over 20 years of experience with cross-cultural movement building. She earned her Masters Degree in Intercultural Communication Studies from San Francisco State University, where she also taught and conducted research with diverse immigrant organizations and communities in the Bay Area. She has extensive experience starting and running innovative organizations, leadership development and income generating programs. As the Executive Director of Partnership for Immigrant Leadership and Action (PILA) from 2003-08, she helped build the capacity of diverse immigrant based organizations in the Bay Area and launch Mobilize the Immigrant Vote California Collaborative (MIV). Prior to that she was the Lead Consultant for The Civic Engagement Project for Children and Families, a consortium of private foundations who invested in community driven policymaking around California’s Proposition 10. Maria also helped establish five Greenpeace offices from scratch in Latin America in the early 1990’s, and was instrumental in creating self-sufficiency programs to enable locally driven initiatives for environmental sustainability.[1]
RoadMap
Maria Rogers Pascual is a consultant with RoadMap, a Freedom Road Socialist Organization affiliated consultancy group .[2]