Marisol Jiménez is the founder and lead consultant for Tepeyac Consulting and brings over twenty years of community engagement, training/facilitation, and policy advocacy experience to her practice. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Loyola University Chicago and her Master of Social Work (MSW) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work. She served as adjunct faculty at both NC State University’s and UNC Chapel Hill’s social work graduate programs offering courses in social policy analysis and advocacy, community engagement, and racial equity. She was also invited to offer the commencement address at both universities in 2006 and 2010.
Marisol served as the Advocacy Director and Chief Lobbyist for El Pueblo, a NC statewide advocacy organization working on public policy issues at the local, state, and national levels. She analyzed and researched the impacts of public policies affecting the immigrant community and lobbied members of the NC General Assembly and the U.S. Congress for progressive changes in the sectors of health, farmworker rights, education, housing, civil rights, public safety, and immigration. She co-wrote and lobbied for a NC in-state tuition bill that garnered statewide and national attention, led efforts to defend access to drivers’ licenses for undocumented immigrants, and mobilized communities across North Carolina around comprehensive immigration reform. She was a steering committee member of the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform National Strategy Council (2007); and led statewide efforts to organize mass demonstrations for immigrant justice in 2006 and 2007. In 2007, Marisol was recognized for her efforts and given the ACLU Award for Advocacy.
Through this work, it became clear that dynamics of power, privilege, and oppression were often replicated within social justice movements and even contributed to her own professional advancement. Marisol made a decision to lean into a growing analysis of her own privilege and shift her position within social justice efforts towards racial equity organizational development and leadership coaching. Marisol joined the consulting firm of OpenSource Leadership Strategies, a national consulting firm committed to amplifying the work of social justice organizations and served as the Racial Equity Training Director. She co-developed a framework for a structural analysis of inequities and tools for equity action planning that are now used with hundreds of nonprofit organizations and foundations nationally. Marisol, herself, has trained hundreds of community leaders, nonprofit staff and board, and government leaders across the country on how to build an analysis of structural inequities and develop equity strategies to address them.
In 2015, she transitioned out of her work with OpenSource Leadership Strategies in order to invest more deeply in her local community as an activist and organizer while also building an independent consulting practice – Tepeyac Consulting. Tepeyac Consulting is a North Carolina-based consulting practice that catalyzes strategic equity efforts in collaboration with grassroots leaders, nonprofit organizations, and foundations. She believes in the power of connecting communities that are most often marginalized from decision-making tables with opportunities to amplify their voices and meaningfully lead social justice efforts. Tepeyac offers the resources, tools, and frameworks to develop and deepen organizations’ and communities’ capacity with an explicit and intentional structural analysis of power that informs the work every step of the way.
For the past 10 years, Marisol has worked in multiple capacities to advance equity through facilitation and training, participatory research, transformational community engagement, and frontline activism. Her consulting incorporates popular education, language justice, inclusive logistics, and accessible content as standards of practice. Marisol has worked with leaders in the areas of education, immigrant justice, workers’ rights, youth leadership development, health, and the environment. Through Tepeyac Consulting, Marisol has been able to work on a number of exciting projects, including: building the infrastructure of a sanctuary movement with Compañeros Inmigrantes de las Montañas en Acción (CIMA) and Nuestro Centro; partnering with the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation to strengthen the statewide infrastructure of the NC Latino immigrant justice movement; and offering racial equity trainings and coaching for community leaders and organizations across the country. Marisol has an established record of holding spaces and guiding processes that support meaningful dialogue across lines of difference, move groups from analysis to action, and hold space for courageous conversations and deep self-reflection.
It is our strong belief that this work is most impactful when it is intersectional, proactive, collaborative, and radically hopeful.
