Kristine Alvarez

As a right-brain person who avoided business training of any kind in college, I never imagined I would ultimately spend more than a decade working with nonprofit leaders to use financial data to achieve their mission. 

I came to the sector because I wanted to be part of programs serving children and families in my hometown of Philadelphia.  Early on, I worked with an AmeriCorps program that provided mentorship and tutoring for children in the city’s public schools.  In this role with a small program, I wore many different hats—from training volunteers to writing grants to creating outreach materials to coordinating special events. I experienced firsthand how the inaccessible nature of financial jargon created real challenges for people like me, who needed to make well-informed program and operational decisions.  I decided to go to business school to bridge the gap between the language of program and the language of finance.  After completing my MBA at The George Washington University and spending two years coaching nonprofits on earned income ventures, I found NFF in 2005. 

The reason I am here is because I believe that what we do makes a tangible difference to those on the front lines serving communities and to the wider social services sector.  I appreciate NFF’s approach as a learning organization to listen first, to take care in meeting our clients where they are, and to be sensitive to their important community, historical, racial, cultural and other contexts.  I am proud to be part of an organization that understands the important work of creating a just society—and recognizes its place of privilege to advocate on behalf of the nonprofit sector for better access to capital and to the social currency afforded by financial fluency.