Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On the show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help you increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have 1 request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, that helps more people learn how to have a positive impact through values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to Cecilia Pacheco, and our topic is supporting social entrepreneurship in Indian country.

Cecilia is a program manager, tribal entrepreneurship at the University of New Mexico's Coast Rainforest Innovations and the host of the Indigenous Entrepreneurship Podcast. Welcome to the show, Cecilia.

Hi. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for saying yes. I I reached out to Cecilia after we kind of been, like, overlapping a little bit here in the New Mexico ecosystem. I'm like, wait. An indigenous entrepreneur's podcast. Wait. A tribal entrepreneurship program. Please come on the show and tell our listeners about it. So thank you so much for taking time in your busy schedule.

Yeah. Of course. Happy to be here.

Yeah. So before we get into the awesome work you're doing, Cecilia, give us a little bit. What would somebody wanna know about your back story and just who is Cecilia so we get a sense of who's doing this awesome work.

Okay. So my name is Cecilia Pacheco. I am Born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, like multi generational New Mexican. I grew up in Santa Fe. I attended the University of New Mexico where, originally, I wanted to go into physical therapy, but then I switched And just got a liberal arts degree and ended up in UNM's MBA program, which I really enjoyed. And during my time there, started an internship at what was, at that point in time, called stc.unm, which is now known as UNM Rainforest Innovations. So I started in 2017 as an innovation intern at The technology transfer and patenting and then economic development office of UNM. And so I did that internship for about a year.

And when I graduated with my MBA, they hired me on as a full time staff member, which I've been a full time staff member ever since, marking various roles. I started off Doing a lot of marketing and some economic development work with our technologies. That was my first role and then Transitioned to just focusing in on economic development where I was the project coordinator for our university center program, which set the foundation for now our tribal entrepreneurship program. So I transitioned from that role into my current role last year in, like, May of 2022. And so Now I'm really working just focused on tribal entrepreneurship and economic development in that realm.

Thanks for that background, and a shout out to the general kind of overall umbrella of UNM. Listeners. If you've been around for a while, you might remember we had now dean of the business school at UNM, Riley White. A couple years back, we did a conference here in New Mexico on social entrepreneurship and impact investing, and it was a university and private sector business folks partnering to talk more about how to get that conversation going in a more robust ways. So UNM's got a lot of good things going, and the leadership there has just been really supportive of impact investing in social entrepreneurship. So just a big shout out to UNL.

Now Riley White was my finance professor for my MBA program, and he's really great.

He's awesome. And then Wellington, he was more on the, impact investing side of things. And, Wellington septic, I think, is still there. I don't actually know. It was more on the social entrepreneur. The 2 of them partnered and then a dear friend of mine who's also been a guest on this podcast and just did Thanksgiving at her house, Genevieve Chavez Mitchell, who's writing a book called Sacred Money. Genevieve was more the community member working on impact investing. She and her husband have been impact investing with their retirement funds for more than 25 years, and I was more there to be sort of the community representative on social entrepreneur side.