Welcoming Maria Clara Nogueira Cruz, LALA’s new Ecosystem Junior Manager

Maria Clara studied Public Administration in Brazil with an exchange experience in South Korea, where she had the chance to study International Relations and Diplomatic Studies. Clara’s first work experience was in the public sector.

She worked at the (0110).Lab, a public innovation lab at the São Paulo Municipality, where she became in touch with agile methodologies, design thinking, and plain language and learned the importance of putting the users at the center of any public policy. Afterward, she went to Lemann Foundation to work with Leadership in people management in the public sector. At Lemann Foundation (FL), Clara had the opportunity to learn and apply teams’ engagement and the mapping of the ecosystem of people’s management in the public sector. She also dealt with production evidence for the decision-making process and management of partners and actors related to the FL ecosystem. In 2021 Clara was the co-responsible for the Gender Diversity Group (GD) – Lemann Foundation Diversity Initiative. She also had a brief experience as an institutional relations and communication consultant for a school for children and teens with High Abilities/Giftedness.

As the Ecosystem Junior Manager at LALA, Clara helps build, scale and manage the infrastructures that support alumni engagement & development. That means she is the go-to person to help students remove barriers and unlock their freedom to pursue their leadership and social impact journey readily.

“The fact that LALA has a holistic look around the young leaders amazes me and it makes me really blessed to be part of an organization like LALA. I really love that LALA wants to empower Latin Americans in order to unleash freedoms that for many reasons have been taken away from us!” – Maria Clara, Ecosystem Junior Manager

Jessica Kenny, Senior Program Manager, shared that she is “thrilled to be able to hand over the important role of leading alumni engagement to someone as passionate and foundationally solid as Clara. It’s a relief to know that the LALA Ecosystem is in such skillful hands.”

Clara is super excited to build a sustainable and regenerative ecosystem of initiatives within LALA. She is keen to contribute to lessening the burden of Societal and Family expectations on our students, giving them support, tools, and access to anything they need on their epic development journey.