Her Story
About veronica
Veronica Urdaneta serves as Fund Developer and Community Outreach Coordinator at the Alameda Point Collaborative, a position she began two weeks prior to the interview. In this role, she focuses on generating resources through fundraising and grants to support unhoused individuals in the Bay Area, including workforce development, digital literacy, and financial literacy programs at a former naval base site with an on-site farm. Previously, she worked as a Cooperatives Developer at Mission Action in San Francisco and held multiple positions at UC Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science, including community outreach volunteer coordinator, where she led volunteer and membership programs, media outreach, public relations, and community programming. Urdaneta studied communications at San Francisco State University and brings expertise in community development and organizing, strategic partnerships, event planning, grant administration, volunteer recruiting and training, facilitation, and communications. She is fluent in Spanish, English, and two additional languages, with experience providing bilingual interpretation in legal, education, healthcare, and social service settings. Her background also includes volunteer work with Team Tech San Francisco, the Unitarian Committee for Democracy in Germany, and KPFK radio station in Los Angeles.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with veronica
01What do you attribute your success to?
I think family. I had a happy childhood and supportive parents and relatives, and knowing that those pillars are strong, no matter what happens. They're there, and being able to access memories that were good. Every time that I feel sad, I just evoke a good memory, a good time, and a good person in my life that inspired me, and that's what family does.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
Try to picture yourself doing for 8 hours. Try to picture yourself doing something that you would be able to do for 8 hours. If you cannot do that for 8 hours consecutively, it means that that's not a career that you want to pursue in life.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
We live in a world where productivity is defined in a very capitalistic way as money. Moving away from that towards the fundamental reason of living, which is improving our existence without making it related to money, monetary and success. How much do I make? How much do I have? It's very materialistic and I think that's what's killing us.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Honesty. Honest to you, the organization that I work with, because it's honest with the people that they work with, it's transparent with their funding, it's transparent with their workers. Because part of my career involves marketing and communications, sometimes you do things just to sell a product, an idea, an opinion, and if you don't believe that that product is good, that that idea will be successful and have an impact, or that your opinion is corroborated by evidence, please don't do it, because that's dishonest.
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