Emilia Cerrillo is a seasoned marketing and operations professional with over 15 years of experience in the professional sector. She has extensive experience with day-to-day management of administrative and office coordination, to more complex project coordination specific to event planning, marketing, and client relations. Having held positions primarily in real estate and financial firms, Emilia is able to tailor her unique skillset to meet the needs of various situations and clients.
When Emilia is not in the office, she finds ways to support businesses in building better marketing and branding initiatives as a marketing consultant to small businesses. Together with her husband, they work with small businesses to build marketing strategies that aid organic business growth through identity development and projects. Working closely with business owners is invigorating and grounds Emilia to her core passion – bridging communities and opportunities.
Between her ability to maneuver the private sector, and working one-on-one with small businesses, her inner passion is fueled by a desire to create conversation and bridge opportunities. In 2016, she co-founded Social Voyagers in Menlo Park, CA with a long-time friend and former teacher of her own high-school alma mater. This organization provides students with the opportunity to learn about service as a method for community-building and provides students the opportunity to travel internationally to Latin America on service-oriented trips throughout the year. The objective is to gradually build a culture of service and international cross-cultural understanding resulting in a population of stronger student-body leadership.
At age of 16, as a student at the same school, she was fortunate to participate in a similar conceptual program called Amigos de Las Americas where she lived in Brazil for 9 weeks during the summer between her Sophomore and Junior year. She credits this trip as the pivot in her life to a direction of curiosity and desire to understanding people, especially those that are marginalized. This initial trip pioneered her subsequent involvement in the student travel group Global Visionaries followed by Global Leaders. She travelled on student service-oriented projects to Guatemala and Costa Rica on at least 5 occasions. After twenty years of service-learning being taught in the school as club-style group, in 2020 it was made official the subject would be classified for students to participate and receive credit. The Menlo-Atherton Service-Learning Center is a byproduct of the work conducted in building Social Voyagers. It is one of the only service-oriented resource groups/centers in the Bay Area with a focus on this style of leadership development. The Social Voyagers serves as the co-partner of the M-A SLC program. In 2020, the Social Voyagers took their first beta-group of 19 students to Costa Rica. Due to the pandemic, all program travel halted, but student interaction and learning continued online. In February 2022, the inaugural group of students will return to Costa Rica to continue their work; there are already 25 students registered.
Emilia has many interests with the same central theme – helping people becoming better through access to education, understanding, or even opportunity. Her professional interests are:
- Connecting people to financial education that can empower one’s goals.
- Creating opportunity for students to travel and experience different cultures.
- Prove that its never to late to go back and finish what you started.
Emilia’s academic interest in History, and specifically Latin American History, and Interdisciplinary Studies, is to create a space where critical understanding of the historical implications of colonization, imperialism, and limitation, and how we can adjust the way we internalize that information so that we can better position ourselves and embrace the destiny we want, not settle for. How has our history stifled our ability to harness our ability to create wealth and our version of the American dream?
Emilia lives the Bronx, NY with her husband, but always dreams of the day she can move back to her hometown in California. In the meantime, making regular visits provides the best of both worlds — Bay Area tacos and New York City pizza.
