Latina of Influence | Cecilia Muñoz

Ms. Cecilia Muñoz is the Director of the Domestic Policy Council, which coordinates the domestic policy-making process in the White House is one of Hispanic Lifestyle’s 2013 Latinas of Influence. She is being celebrated for her lifelong commitment to her community and public service.

Hispanic Lifestyle will be hosting a Latinas of Influence Reception on April 3, 2013 in Ontario, California. The public is invited to attend, but you need to make a reservation.

Follow all of our 2013 Latinas of Influence on twitter with the tag #hltv2013

[highlight]About our Latina of Influence – Cecilia Muñoz [/highlight]

Prior to this role, she served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Intergovernmental Affairs where she oversaw the Obama Administration’s relationships with state and local governments.

Before joining the Obama Administration, Cecilia served as Senior Vice President for the Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the nation’s largest Latino civil rights organization. She supervised NCLR’s policy staff covering a variety of issues of importance to Latinos, including civil rights, employment, poverty, farmworker issues, education, health, housing, and immigration. Her particular area of expertise is immigration policy, which she covered at NCLR for twenty years.

Ms. Muñoz has testified numerous times before Congress and appears regularly in the Spanish- and English-language media. Her media credits include the Today Show, Good Morning America, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Dateline NBC, O’Reilly Factor, CNN’s Situation Room, and National Public Radio.

Ms. Muñoz is the former Chair of the Board of Center for Community Change, and served on the U.S. Programs Board of the Open Society Institute and the Board of Directors of the Atlantic Philanthropies and the National Immigration Forum.

Cecilia Muñoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy

Ms. Muñoz is the daughter of immigrants from Bolivia and was born in Detroit, Michigan. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and her master’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley. In June 2000, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in recognition of her work on immigration and civil rights. In 2007, she served as the Towsley Foundation Policymaker in Residence at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. She has received numerous other awards and recognitions from various sources, including the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and a variety of local non-profit organizations.