Maria Picard-Ami
Adjunct Faculty
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, I was raised in the Panama Canal Zone and Panama where I graduated from High School. I traveled to Bogota, Colombia and later to Mexico City to finish my undergraduate degree in Social Anthropology from the Universidad Iberoamericana, specializing in rural economic development and land tenue issues. After graduation, I worked extensively in community economic development and outreach, organizing and implementing self-help social justice programs in public, nonprofit and private (consulting) settings at federal, regional and local levels. When relocating to El Paso, Texas, I initiated my Masters in Public Administration studies, focusing on borderland nonprofit and colonia development issues. Soon after graduation, I started working with a women’s rights border nonprofit organization focused on economic development, community building, and civic engagement. Here I developed my expertise in the emerging field of social enterprise in a binational and multicultural urban and regional planning and policymaking setting. While completing the Regional and Urban Planning Certificate at UTEP, I developed a method for measuring social and businesses costs to enable the evaluation of market strategies for social and economic development. Once completed, I was offered a position as a visiting faculty in the MPA program to help develop the curricula related to nonprofits and social enterprise for the program. I started teaching Government classes at the El Paso Community College (EPCC) in 2007 while working on my MBA, to concentrate on understanding the relationships between business and society, exploring the challenging field of corporate social responsibility in emerging markets. In 2008 I became a member of a newly structured Proposal Development Team at a Hispanic Serving Institution of Higher Education, tasked with helping transition the towards a campus-wide culture of funded research. By 2019, the Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é had gone from 40 to over 100 million in research expenditures and had been able to achieve Tier1 (Research I) status, a huge accomplishment for an open access Hispanic majority institution. In 2010 I initiated doctoral studies in Administrative Sciences, using a systems approach to explore the interrelations of small business networks in the implementation of social and economic development projects along the US Mexico Border. I currently teach part-time at EPCC and UTEP. Additionally, I work at UTEP in the area of research development. Parallel to my academic activities, I have done public presentations on social enterprise and environmental racism for diverse audiences; volunteered as an external mentor for MBA students; served on the Fair Housing Task Force Committee of the City of El Paso, on the MPA External Advisory Board at UTEP, the Friends of the El Paso Library Board, and on the Board of Directors of La Mujer Obrera Dba Centro del Obrero Fronterizo, in El Paso Tx.