ABOUT cecilia Muñoz

Cecilia Muñoz is a national leader in public policy and public interest technology with over three decades of experience in the non-profit sector and 8 years of service on President Obama’s senior team. She is the author of the award-winning More Than Ready: Be Strong and Be You...and Other Lessons for Women of Color on the Rise, which shares insights from her career as well as the careers of other notable women of color. She is also a contributing author to Immigration Matters, West Wingers, What My Mother Gave Me, and This I Believe.

Cecilia spent two decades at the National Council of La Raza (now UNIDOS US); winning a MacArthur Fellowship for her work on immigration and civil rights. She served in President Barack Obama's West Wing, becoming the first Latino to lead the White House Domestic Policy Council. She serves on a number of nonprofit boards, including the Kresge, MacArthur and Joyce Foundations, New America, Protect Democracy, and Civic Nation. She also serves on the boards of Headspace Health and AdHoc.

More about Cecilia

Cecilia has spent her entire career in the non-profit and public sectors. Originally from the Midwest, the daughter of immigrants from Bolivia, she moved to Washington in the late 1980s to work on immigration policy at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR, now Unidos US), the nation’s largest Hispanic policy and advocacy organization. She spent 20 years at NCLR, developing expertise on a range of policy issues and eventually leading its Office of Research, Advocacy and Legislation. 

In 2009 she joined the Obama administration, where she spent 8 years in the West Wing, first as Director of Intergovernmental Affairs followed by five years as Director of the Domestic Policy Council (DPC). She is the first Hispanic person to serve as the DPC Director.

Cecilia serves as an advisor to several nonprofits, and co-chairs the Office of American Possibilities, a civic moonshot factory that aims to solve public challenges across divides.  She is a trustee of the Kresge, MacArthur and Joyce Foundations and serves on the boards of several nonprofit organizations. She took leave from all of her organizational affiliations in 2020 to lead the domestic and economic policy team at the Biden/Harris Presidential Transition. 

She is also a Senior Fellow at Results for America, a nonprofit that advances the use of data and evidence in policy making, and Senior Advisor to Hyphen, a nonprofit which works to build public-private partnerships between philanthropy and government. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000 for her work on immigration and civil rights.  

Cecilia is also a wife and mother of two grown daughters. She lives with her husband in Maryland.