Luis Granados (Board President)
Chief Executive Officer, MEDA
Serving on Board since: 2014
Luis Granados has proudly served as the Executive Director for the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA) since 1999, becoming Chief Executive Officer in 2018. During his tenure, Luis has worked to create asset-development opportunities for San Francisco Bay Area low- to moderate-income Latino families. Luis has a Master’s in City and Regional Planning from University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor’s of Science from University of California, Davis. Luis also sits on the following boards: Board Member, UnidosUS (formerly NCLR); Board Chair, California Reinvestment Coalition; Community Advisory Board Member, JPMorgan Chase & Co.; Board Member, National Association of Latino Community Asset Builders, and Board Member, Community Vision (formerly Northern California Community Loan Fund).
Luis’ work is driven by his experience as an immigrant from Juarez, Mexico, his family heading to Southern California when he was a teenager.
Kevin Stein
Associate Director, California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC)
Serving on Board since: 2014
Kevin Stein works primarily on housing and small business issues, including efforts to fight predatory mortgage lending. Kevin was the primary author of CRC’s reports, “Stolen Wealth: Inequities in California’s Subprime Mortgage Market,” which investigated subprime and predatory lending practices in the state, and “Who Really Gets Home Loans? Years Ten and Eleven” and “Who Really Gets Higher Cost Home Loans,” a duo of analyses of home lending that explores the relationship between race and the cost of credit. Before coming to CRC, Kevin was Supervising Attorney at the East Palo Alto Community Law Project and Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, working on community economic development issues. Prior to that, he worked at HomeBase, a law and social policy center on homelessness. Kevin is a graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center and Stanford University.
Teresa García
Family Resource Center Program Associate, First 5 San Francisco
Serving on Board since: 2018
M. Teresa García has worked as a business consultant, nationally and abroad, providing economic-development strategy for the past 17 years. She is dedicated to grassroots small businesses and community-economic development in underrepresented communities. Teresa showcases an excellent understanding of small-business challenges and economic development issues as they relate to startup microenterprises, especially family child care facilities. She holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration.
Erik Ortiz
Senior Vice President, Managing Director, Five Star Bank
Serving on Board since: 2018
Erik Ortiz has 10+ years of commercial banking experience, with a primary focus on professional service firms, early stage technology companies, non-profit organizations, and commercial real estate. He graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of San Francisco where he was also a student athlete with the USF Men’s Soccer Team. Erik is an active member of Street Soccer USA, a non-profit organization dedicated towards impacting the lives of thousands of underserved youth in urban areas and among special needs populations, including homeless families, adults, people in recovery, among others. He was born and raised in Sacramento, CA and now resides in San Francisco.
Carolina Martinez
Chief Executive Officer, California Association for Micro Enterprise Opportunity (CAMEO)
Serving on Board since: 2018
Carolina Martinez is the CEO of the California Association for Micro Enterprise Opportunity (CAMEO), a California’s statewide association that represents over 220 lenders, training programs, job creators, agencies and individuals dedicated to furthering micro-business development in the state. CAMEO advocates for its members and builds their capacity to support the more than 21,000 very small businesses they serve.
Carolina has over 12 years of experience working in economic development and business consulting. Her vision has been defined by the variety of experiences she’s had with nonprofits and universities in South and North America. She has developed bilingual, culturally appropriate entrepreneurial training programs; trained and coached pre-venture and startups; developed international networks promoting partnerships among private corporations that boost industries; provided consulting services to vulnerable communities to explore entrepreneurship as a way to generate wealth; and owned her own business consulting firm.
Before moving to California in 2017, Carolina was appointed to the Pennsylvania Governor’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs and served as Chairwoman for the Berks County Latino Chamber of Commerce in Pennsylvania.
Ruby Harris
Co-Director of Lending, Community Vision
Serving on Board since: 2019
Ruby Harris manages Community Vision’s (formerly known as the Northern California Community Loan Fund/NCCLF) Community Development Lending team where she engages in lending strategy, business development, and direct underwriting. Community development lending supports a range of activities, including affordable housing, healthcare, education, community facilities, nonprofit space, and provides working capital for service organizations. Ruby joined the organization in 2018 with extensive affordable housing experience, ranging from nonprofit management, program/product design, project management, public policy, finance and grant-making. In her most recent role, Ruby was the Program Manager for the City of San Francisco’s Small Sites Program and was instrumental in preserving hundreds of housing units throughout the city. Ruby holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley in Ethnic Studies and City Planning.
Lucy Arellano Baglieri
Founder & CEO, Luz Impact Strategies
Serving on Board since: 2023
Mrs. Arellano Baglieri brings more than 15 years of community development management and strategy experience with a focus on social justice and racial equity. In 2024, Mrs. Arellano Baglieri launched Luz Impact Strategies, a consulting firm whose mission is to build capacity, increase access to capital, improve outcomes, and accumulate power for people and communities of color.
Before the full launch of the firm, Mrs. Arellano Baglieri served as Chief Strategy Officer & Executive Vice President for the Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF), one of the country’s largest national Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI), and led organizational strategy, racial equity, and external affairs.
Prior to joining LIIF in 2020, she served as Chief Strategy Officer for the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA), leading the organization’s regional and national work focused on economic and racial equity initiatives in Latino and immigrant communities across the country.
Her work draws on her own lived experience as a proud immigrant from Mexico, and a career dedicated to communities facing the deepest inequities, working largely across Black and Latino communities.
Mrs. Arellano Baglieri’s core belief is that equitable community development must center communities of color and correct power imbalances with the explicit goal of community ownership and power. Her experience includes direct services, affordable real estate development and preservation, policy and advocacy, equitable CDFI lending for entrepreneurship and affordable real estate, collective impact education networks, and place-based strategies. She has also led internal organizational racial equity, strategy, evaluation, and professional development initiatives. Mrs. Arellano Baglieri is nationally recognized for her leadership and invited to share her perspective on equitable community development by a range of groups, including the Aspen Institute, UnidosUS, NALCAB, Affordable Housing Investment Council (AHIC), the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, the National Housing Conference, and Novogradac. Mrs. Arellano Baglieri serves on the board of directors of National Affordable Housing Trust (NAHT) and National Housing Trust (NHT). Mrs. Arellano Baglieri holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington. She is natively fluent in Spanish and is based in Northern California.
Juan Carlos Hernández
President and CEO, California Southern Small Business Development Corporation
Serving on Board since: 2023
Mr. Hernández is the President and CEO of California Southern Small Business Development Corporation. He joined Cal-Southern as the Chief Credit Officer/Senior Vice President in May of 2018, and was appointed as President and CEO of the organization in January 2021.
Prior to joining Cal-Southern, Hernández was Chief Credit Officer of ACCION San Diego from 2014 to 2018 and was responsible for lending staff supervision and training, program development, underwriting, loan portfolio quality and management, loss mitigation and recovery; and participating in the development of bank and community partner relations.
He is originally from Mexico City; moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1977 and has resided in San Diego since July of 2012. Hernández has over 30 years of experience in banking, including consumer, business and commercial real estate lending. In Chicago, he worked for Metropolitan Bank Group, La Salle Bank & Trust and The First National Bank of Chicago. He has been featured in various newspaper articles including The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Hernández served as Chairman of the Board for the San Diego County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce from 2015 to 2019 and is currently serving on the Boards of Chicano Federation, Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovations and San Diego Parks Foundation.
Hernández received a B.A. in Sociology, with an emphasis in WorkForce Studies from University of Illinois at Chicago.
Lina Mills
Small Business Owner, Creative Ideas Catering SF LLC
Serving on Board since: 2023
Lina Mills is the owner of Creative Ideas Catering SF LLC, a full-service catering business and brick and mortar Cafe. The business uses sustainable practices and a customer-driven team to provide a global fusion of Latin flavors, specializing in Colombian and Mexican staples. Lina makes a big emphasis on maintaining close relationships with local providers to ensure a steady supply of fresh, seasonable, local produce and meats, choosing organic whenever possible, with the end goal to prepare high-quality food, as well as to support the local smaller businesses.
Lina has been a client of MEDA for many years and has received services from Fondo’s Business Development and Lending Teams. Some of the services provided include business coaching, financing to open her Cafe in San Francisco, an SF HELP loan during the COVID-19 pandemic, support to submit Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, amongst other services. We hope that Lina can provide a business-owner perspective to our Board, and share insight on the needs of our community to better adjust our services to them.
Most recently, Lina was named the 2022 SBA Northern California Small Business Person of the Year and 2022 MEDA’s Business of the Year.