Maria Pena Email and Phone Number

Over the past two decades, Maria has established herself as a proven business leader in both the corporate and nonprofit sectors. Maria currently serves as a Partner at The Management Center, where she works with senior non-profit executives to build the skills and implement the changes needed to improve the way their organizations run. She previously served as the President of LIFT, a national non-profit that works to empower parents of young children to break the cycle of poverty. In that role, Maria Peña led day-to-day operations and drove innovation and alignment across all aspects of LIFT’s work nationwide. Maria originally joined LIFT as Chief Program Officer and, during her tenure, spearheaded an “impact first” approach to performance management that led to a doubling of recorded impact in just two years. Prior to LIFT, Maria served as the global head of economic development at Vital Voices, an international NGO founded by Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright to invest in women leaders around the world. Maria began her career as a management consultant to Fortune 500 companies at PwC Consulting and IBM, eventually serving as Americas Leader of Entrepreneurship at Ernst & Young, where she directed the firm’s corporate responsibility efforts to accelerate the growth of businesses across North, Central, and South America. Maria is an accomplished speaker on poverty, economic development and women’s issues. She and her work have been featured in the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, and at the World Economic Forum in Davos. She has also served in several policy roles, including as a U.S. delegate to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum on women and a member of the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy - Sub-Committee on Women.Maria graduated from the Univ. of Pennsylvania with a degree in Economics and lives in Washington, DC with her husband and son.