Valeria Perez-Ferreiro

Valeria is the Founding Executive Director of GreenLight Fund Miami. Valeria is dedicated to creating pathways for economic equity and inclusion in partnership with marginalized communities. She has over 25 years of experience designing and implementing economic mobility, workforce development and financial inclusion initiatives.

Before joining GreenLight Fund, Valeria served close to 10 years at Citi as Vice president and Community Development Senior Manager. There she worked with community partners, marshaling the bank’s resources and philanthropy to help launch and scale innovative economic inclusion initiatives, such as: FutureBound Miami, a universal children’s savings account program empowers children and their families to save for post-secondary education and training, StartUp FIU Food (now StartUp FIU Local), which helped lower income entrepreneurs launch food businesses, and the Office of New Americans of Miami Dade-County, a nonprofit embedded in Miami-Dade County’s government that promotes naturalization.

Valeria has spent the bulk of her career in the nonprofit sector in roles such as Vice President of Resource Development at Accion USA (now Ascendus), Associate Director at OpNet Community Ventures, and Director of Thrive Kitchen, an economic development project. Launching La Cocina, California’s first kitchen incubator, was among her most formative and rewarding professional experiences, one that still informs her work with community partners. As Founding Executive Director she built an organization that provides resources that empower lower-income BIPOC and immigrant food entrepreneurs to formalize and grow their businesses into sustainable livelihoods and sources of jobs for the community. The organization has continued to thrive under the leadership of staff that she hired.

Valeria was a founding board member of the Mission Asset Fund and of the Office of New Americans of Miami-Dade County and also served on the board of the South Florida Community Development Coalition.

Valeria is a native of Argentina.  She has a B.A. from Cornell University and a Master’s degree in Public Policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.