Growing up in Mexico City, Cecilia Velazquez remembers the air pollution. Around 20% of teens develop asthma in the city, which sits in a high-altitude basin, and her family wanted to escape the smog. Unfortunately for Cecilia, her closest family outside of Mexico City was in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. and in Alaska. In order to leave the pollution of Mexico City behind, they settled in Tacoma, Wash., because, of the two places, it was “warmer.”
Upon graduation, Cecilia completed a Bachelor’s of Business Administration and subsequently a Master’s in Accounting at the University of Washington. “My heart was set on doing international business and being able to leverage my Spanish and work internationally,” she says. Cecilia began her career at a Big 4 firm as an auditor but got an opportunity to pursue international work when she joined AlixPartners’ Risk practice.
Early projects brought her home to Mexico City, where she could visit with family for the weekend. “What AlixPartners offers you is the opportunity to continuously be growing throughout your career and be able to get comfortable with the uncomfortable,” says Cecilia, who is now a Senior Vice President with the firm. “We're helping our clients navigate difficult situations and cut through complexity at the same time.”
It also allowed her a continuing opportunity to grow as a leader.
Cecilia was one of the founding members of the Hispanics or Latinxs at AlixPartners (HOLA) employee resource group, which began in 2017. “I remember getting the documentation that said, ‘Sign off if you want to create the HOLA network,’ and I was very excited to see that AlixPartners was making that commitment to create a standing affinity network,” she recalls.
The ERG began with 15 members and swelled to over 300 in Cecilia’s tenure as global co-leader.
The group has found a host of ways to connect its members and engage employees, from tequila tasting events to programming that goes “beyond just our food and music,” she explains. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the group hosted virtual sessions to offer support to a disparate membership, some of whom were isolated from their home countries by the labyrinthine border closure policies across the Americas. As a long-time remote employee (Cecilia spent two years in the New York office before returning to Seattle, Wash.), she understood how important that connection was.
After the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, HOLA partnered with the Caregivers and Parents ERG (CAPE) to hold a support session. Nineteen students and two teachers were killed—members of a largely Hispanic community—and the idea was to create space for people to process their own feelings. The session was anchored by one of the owners of the Pulse nightclub, another site of a mass shooting. “I was hurting, and this allowed me to have a safe space to just process some of those emotions,” says Cecilia. “That was one of the things I'd say was a very pivotal part of my tenure.”
In terms of her own development, Cecilia was selected to participate in the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility Young Hispanic Corporate Achievers™ program and has also completed online learning programs at University of Oxford and University of Cambridge, where she recently completed a course in Sustainable Supply Chain Management. She hopes to integrate her work in the Litigations, Disputes, and Risk practice with the firm’s growing ESG practice.
“There is this consideration for watching our pollution, ensuring we have sustainable lives, and we help our companies, and our clients also make that move as well.
Cecilia is a dedicated long-distance runner—she has a goal to run either a half- or full marathon in each of the 50 U.S. states and is about to cross off her 39th state—and notes that if she had stayed in Mexico City, asthma would likely have ruled out that possibility. 'It’s been great to come full circle and have a firm that says, hey, we see this is an issue and asks, “how can we help?',” she says.
