Lourdes Barroso de Padilla

AmeriCorps: City Year
City Year
Columbus, Ohio

Lourdes Barroso de Padilla has an extensive background in youth development and leadership.  She has served with City Year, an education focused organization dedicated to helping students and schools succeed for more than 20 years. Lourdes has helped to found five of City Year’s twenty eight sites across the country, and has worked at all levels of the organization. She is a certified Youth Development Trainer and was awarded the Hewlett Packard Alumni Leadership Award in for her impact and service to the organization.

Lourdes is a graduate of Project Diversity, Leadership Columbus, and the Academy for Leadership and Governance Executive Fellowship program.  She has served as a Commissioner with the Ohio Latino Affairs Commission, as a founding member of the Create Columbus Commission and as a board member for Directions for Youth and Families and as a member of the United Way’s Education Impact Council and Diversity and Inclusion Committee.  

Currently she serves as the Vice President of Events for City Year Inc. as well as the Director for the Latina Mentoring Academy a unique professional mentoring program for Latinas in Central Ohio in addition to serving as the President of the Board of Directors for the Latino Empowerment Outreach Network (LEON).  

Lourdes was featured in the inaugural editions of The Women’s Book and Who’s Who in Latino Columbus as well as WELD Ohio’s Women Welding the Way Calendar . She has been honored as one of Business First’s 40 under 40, and was named a Distinguished Hispanic Ohioan by the Ohio Commission on Latino Affairs.

Lourdes is a bilingual first generation Cuban-American who was born and raised on the eastside of Columbus and is a product of the Columbus public school system.  She resides with her husband, Ernesto, and daughters, Eva and Valentina in Eastmoor.