State Rep. Simon Cataldo presented Concord resident Andrea Foncerrada with a citation at the 2023 Latino Excellence on the Hill ceremony sponsored by the Massachusetts Black and Latino Legislative Caucus on October 26.
Foncerrada graduated from the Universidad Iberoamericana, where she majored in political science, and earned her master’s in public policy and management and technology from Carnegie Mellon University. She is currently pursuing an executive master’s in business administration at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In addition, Foncerrada is the president and CEO of The Boston Center.
She has more than 20 years of experience advancing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives by designing and developing solutions and tools for companies and organizations to ensure the sustainability of desired changes. She founded The Boston Center and created www.diversipedia.org, an online platform that promotes the adoption of a continuous training approach on diversity, inclusion, and prevention of violence within companies and universities. They also developed a distinctive mark that guarantees that film productions operate within a framework of non-violence and have both incident reporting mechanisms and effective sexual harassment and discrimination prevention training programs for the film’s crew and staff.
Foncerrada is the founder of the Network for Inclusion, Equality, and Advocacy for Academic Transformation (RIIITA), which consists of individuals responsible for gender committees and handling complaint investigations in universities. She is also the founder of Aúna, an organization that supports women’s candidacies for public office positions. She is a member of the Network of Plural Women, which promotes gender parity in leadership and decision-making positions in the public sector, and she is a member of the board at REDIGE. In her community of Concord, Foncerrada is a founding member and current co-chair of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Commission, where she has taken a leading role in conceptualizing and executing the groundbreaking DEI Community Survey, a milestone achievement for fostering diversity, equality, and inclusion within the town.
