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Blanca Catalina Garcia

Over the span of her 15 years’ experience as an educator, counselor, coach, mentor and leader in multicultural ecosystems, Blanca has honed in on how to create and cultivate spaces where people with diverse stories can feel supported and thrive. Blanca has broad experience supporting professional development and leading educational initiatives in multicultural communities at nationally recognized and awarded non-profits, a top-ten ranked public university and successful private companies. A long time intrapreneur, Blanca is well known for successfully launching innovative programs within organizations. As an entrepreneur, brings her ability to connect communities to her business ventures.

Growing up in the U.S. and abroad, navigating across cultures and codes became natural and key to Blanca’s career. After graduating from Eckerd College with a degree in psychology, focused on research, she worked with multi-lingual youth and their families. Her work spanned from youth healing from domestic violence to drug addiction, as well as, dealing with the judicial, foster care and immigration system, and she found that spaces of safety, support and creativity are critical for people to thrive and for communities to achieve sustainable change. From there, she began working with multilingual populations in the labor sector as an interpreter and trainer, developing programs in the areas of cultural competency, intercultural communication and inclusive practices.

Through her work with diverse communities, she has had the chance to build bridges between groups where race, culture, language, gender, economics and history have drawn lines of difference. She has helped teams and groups collaborate more effectively by healing communication gaps, implementing and modeling diplomacy, creating adaptive educational opportunities that offered relevant tools, presenting innovative initiatives and collaborative strategies. Her creativity and aptitude for communication have helped her to be successful in implementing specialized and sustainable education and mentor programs. She is an expert in workplace training, professional development, intercultural communication, mentoring and innovative operations. After spending the last couple of years leading the award-winning BIG Incubator in Atlanta for digitalundivided, a social enterprise that takes an innovative, transformative approach to economic empowerment by encouraging Black and Latina women to own their economic security through entrepreneurship, Blanca transitioned from intrapreneur to entrepreneur. Blanca is a consultant and coach for new entrepreneurs and is the co-founder of Flagship Founders, a company focused on supporting emerging entrepreneurs and companies.

Aside from her active involvement in the Atlanta innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem, intercultural community and creatives’ community, Blanca values her time with her family. She is married to Emory faculty and published poet Axel Presas, with whom she has two beautiful girls. In their free time, you can find them at the beach or in the forest, enjoying nature. Blanca is also a trained painter and illustrator.