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Federico grew up close to the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego. From his hometown he observed the plight and the indignities of Latin American immigrant families seeking better opportunities in the United States. The son of a Spanish mother and Mexican father, Federico is a passionate globalist and has also lived in Barcelona, Boston, Madrid, Mexico City, New Delhi, and San Francisco.
Federico’s undergraduate studies in Boston and Barcelona focused on business, economics, and international relations. He earned his full tuition as valedictorian of his class at La Salle-Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona.
In college, Federico wrote his final-year thesis on the relationship between international migration, economic development, and social entrepreneurship. His thesis was asserted to be the best in the school’s history, and served as the theoretical backbone for Puentes Global.
Federico went on to earn a Masters in Business Administration, Certificate in Global Management, and Certificate in Public Management from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
While at Stanford, Federico began developing the philosophy for Puentes Global: applying his academic knowledge and the insight and learning garnered from professors, classmates, and the administration. Before graduating, he was awarded the inaugural Stanford Center for Social Innovation (CSI) Fellowship, which enabled him to launch Puentes Global. Read Federico’s profile, interview and blog at the CSI.
During his seven years of management experience, Federico has founded an import-export startup on the U.S.-Mexico border, served as vice president at a wholesale auto-parts firm in Mexico’s BOP, worked in management and marketing consulting in Spain, and led strategic business development initiatives at D.light Design—a venture-backed, global social enterprise in India’s BOP.
Federico feels blessed to be leading Puentes Global, an organization that couldn’t be more aligned with his values as an entrepreneur and, more importantly, as a human being.
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Conchita has worked in social projects since, at age 15, people stopped saying that she was too young to volunteer. At 18, Conchita travelled to El Alto, Bolivia to help develop a child-education project. It was whilst here that she realized that underdevelopment is too complex a problem to be solved solely with goodwill. This prompted her to seek the best possible education that would enable her to maximize the impact of her future development work.
During the following four years, she combined her studies at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid with the founding of Villanueva Solidaria Foundation, which offered mentoring to young people perceived to be at risk—many of them immigrants—in Spain’s capital. After graduating with a B.S. in Economics, and interning at the United Nations, Conchita started work at Banco Santander: Spain’s largest bank. She was responsible for conducting analyses and forecasts of Latin America’s main economies, primarily Mexico, Brazil, and Chile.
Conchita holds a Masters in Public Administration and International Development from Harvard University’s Kennedy School. Over the summer of her first year at Harvard, Conchita worked in Liberia providing assistance to the Ministry of Finance.
Back in Cambridge, she wrote her thesis—It’s possible to have it all… Using migration as a tool for development—with supervision from Lant Pritchett, a leading immigration and economic development scholar.
Today, Conchita leads Puentes Global’s Spain Office. She is certain of—and driven by—one fact: it is possible to reduce global poverty by better managing the experience of migrants.
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