Our Leadership Team

our advisory board

Jonathan Carmona

Jonathan Carmona (he/him/el) is a DEI executive practitioner with 15 years of designing operations, capabilities, and strategies to solve complex problems and drive progress along every stage of the employee lifecycle. As one of few openly LGBTQ+ Latino leaders in the field, he has dedicated his life’s work to addressing systemic inequities, uplifting historically marginalized communities, and enabling organizational change across a wide spread of sectors including academic institutions, startups, healthcare, technology, and environmental. Jonathan is celebrating three years at Patagonia Inc's as Director, Global Justice & Belonging.

Juana V. Chavez

Juana “Juanita” Chavez is the Director of the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization. She leads efforts to protect the environment, address climate change, and advance environmental justice throughout Los Angeles and Orange Counties.
Before joining the Sierra Club, Chavez served at the Dolores Huerta Foundation (DHF) alongside her mother, civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, where she directed Communications and Development and raised funds for DHF’s Peace and Justice Center Capital Campaign.
A graduate of San Francisco State University, Chavez spent more than a decade teaching in underserved public schools in San Francisco and Los Angeles. She co-founded and served as staff advisor to Mission High School’s first Gay-Straight Alliance, and as a United Teachers of Los Angeles Chapter Chair.
Chavez’s career reflects a lifelong commitment to equity, education, and empowering communities to create lasting social and environmental change.

Jessica Smith

Jess is a lifelong student of social change with an appreciation for all the stakeholders needed to make progress. From organizing grassroots efforts in an under-resourced school district on the Dominican-Haitian border to implementing trust-based grantmaking practices for the corporate foundation of a multi-billion dollar company, their commitment to creating equitable change ripples out into every aspect of their work. Jess is relentless in their (un)learning journey, making them a perfect fit for organizations committed to aligning their social impact with their intentions. Their goal is to infuse equity into funding and grantmaking practices to uplift community programs prioritizing the voices of the very people an organization serves, with special consideration for historically excluded and underserved people. They draw from their lived experiences, coupled with their sociological expertise and nonprofit experience, to apply a uniquely inclusive lens in corporate spaces. They also enjoy traveling, biking, and music.

Giselle Armendáriz

Giselle Armendáriz alchemizes their fiery magic into various roles as a liberatory coach, cultural worker, labor organizer and program manager with experience in group facilitation, capacity building, leadership development, coaching, strategic planning, and policy development and implementation. Their leadership skills were cultivated through her work with UNITE HERE! Local 11, UC Irvine, and Liberty Hill Foundation and further nurtured through experience with Coaching for Healing Justice and Liberation and Liberty Hill Workers United, a union under the UAW.
Giselle joined the Liberty Hill Foundation in 2021. They found an aligned path in Capacity Building, becoming an integral part of weaving Healing Justice and embodied leadership into programming for grassroots organizations advancing justice in Los Angeles.
Their leadership skills expanded as part of cohort 3 in Coaching for Healing Justice and Liberation. Learning from Damon Azali-Rojas and Sarah Jawaid, and a cohort of powerful leaders across the nation, Giselle found an answer to the questions they grappled with: it is possible, as siblings and relatives, to advance justice sustainably through embodied leadership and organizing rooted in the witnessing and cultivation of Self and Community.
Giselle’s passionate experience in labor organizing and healing justice culminated in their powerful contribution to the birth of Liberty Hill Workers United (LHWU) Union, under the United Automobile Workers Union, where she serves as Chair for the union.
The youngest child of Mexican immigrants, from a family impacted by the carceral state, Giselle carved their role in systems change as an empowered weaver of coaching, relational organizing, and embodied leadership.

Mayte Sanchez

Mayte Sanchez is the Senior Director of Energy at the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, where she oversees its public-private Clean Energy Partnership that is accelerating the move to 100% clean energy while ensuring we meet the needs of transportation electrification, building decarbonization, and grid resiliency in the Greater Los Angeles Region ahead of the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Prior to LACI, Mayte worked as the Senior State Affairs Liaison at the California Independent System Operator, advancing initiatives that supported California’s clean electric grid transition. Mayte began her work in energy serving as a Legislative Aide for the California State Assembly, where she led a coalition that passed at the time the nation's largest investment in clean energy for low-income renters.

Martine Joelle McDonald

Martine Joelle McDonald is a film curator, teaching artist, and inclusion consultant whose decade-long career sits at the powerful intersection of social impact storytelling, anti-bias education, and narrative change. Fueled by a deep commitment to equity, Martine has championed LGBTQIA+ artists and leaders of color throughout the film industry, working to dismantle pipeline inequities.
Her curatorial and programmatic leadership, artist engagement and jury experiences include NewFest, Seed and Spark, Outfest, UCLA Film & Television Archive, Journeys in Film, Tribeca Institute, SXSWEdu, Firelight Media, and GLAAD and more. As founder of Practice Wonder, she centers and advocates liberatory storytelling and the cultivation of wonder, particularly for young people and underrepresented communities, through consulting, educational programming, and industry workshops.
Based in Los Angeles, Martine also serves on the Board of Trustees at Naropa University. She holds an MFA in Social and Environmental Arts Practice from Prescott College and a BA in Peace Studies from Naropa University.
Martine holds the unwavering belief that narrative change driven by inclusive artists is an essential offering of collective power and advocacy that moves us closer to a more connected, grounded, and compassionate world.