Ana Valdez is the President and CEO of The Latino Donor Collaborative. She is an American marketing, media, research, and political expert and thought leader with 30 years of experience in business, media, and the corporate world. Born and raised in Mexico City, she has studied and worked in Mexico, Europe, and the United States. She has lived in Los Angeles, California, since 1997. Valdez began her career at Nielsen, where she developed the company’s largest market research client base. She then worked for Banamex, now Citibank, attracting multi-billion-dollar foreign investors and helping them identify the best business opportunities in the country. Since then, she has worked at the United Nations in Geneva, the Clinton Administration in Washington, DC, and has collaborated with companies such as Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, CBRE, Morgan Stanley, and McDonald’s, among others.
Since 2014, Valdez has served as the executive leader of the Latino Donor Collaborative, working directly with corporate CEOs and the C-suite to establish a think tank called the Latino Data Collaborative. The LDC produces economic data and business fact-based tools to identify market growth opportunities and develop innovative strategies to engage the new mainstream consumer. Research partners include Columbia, Stanford, UCLA, ASU, Bain, BCG, Accenture, and NERA. As the CEO, Ana has transformed LDC’s data into a tool for all American resource allocators: CEOs, the C-suite, and institutions such as the Federal Reserve, the White House, and the Joint Economic Council of Congress.
At the same time, Ana has served on the board of trustees of Southern California Public Radio since 2011 and chaired the board from 2016 to 2020. During those four years, Ana led the national search for a new CEO and made a deliberate strategic effort to create growth by using fact-based data to identify additional audiences.