Cecilia Muñoz

Cecilia Muñoz joined The Kresge Foundation Board of Trustees in 2017 and assumed the role of board chair in March 2022.

She is a national expert on public policy and public interest technology with deep roots in Detroit and in the civil rights movement. She spent the formative years of her career at the National Council of La Raza (now UNIDOS US), the nation’s largest Latino civil rights organization.

She served for eight years in the Obama Administration, first as the director of intergovernmental affairs and then as the director of the Domestic Policy Council. In 2020, she resumed federal service to lead domestic and economic policy for the Biden-Harris Transition Team.

Following her tenure in the White House, Muñoz joined the think tank New America in 2016 where she helped build the emerging field of public interest technology. She left New America’s staff in 2023 and joined its Board of Directors.

Muñoz is a senior fellow at Results for America, a nonprofit that advances the use of data and evidence in policymaking, and a senior advisor to Hyphen, a nonprofit intermediary that facilitates high-impact public-private partnerships to address some of the nation’s greatest challenges. She also co-chairs an incubator for new initiatives that launched Welcome.US and Dignity.US.

Muñoz is a board member of AdHoc, a digital services company, a trustee of the Joyce and MacArthur foundations, and serves on advisory boards for the Open Society and JPB foundations. In addition, she serves on the board of several nonprofit organizations including Protect Democracy and Civic Nation.

In 2000, she earned a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” for her work on civil rights and immigration. She is the author of More Than Ready: Be Strong and Be You…and Other Lessons for Women of Color on the Rise, which shares insights from her career and the careers of other notable women of color.