Gery Paredes Vásquez
Gery Paredes Vásquez (ella, tu, she, her) is a dedicated, proactive, generative, and collaborative organizational leader. A lifelong practitioner with 20 years of experience developing and nurturing strategic collaborations for intersectional racial justice, collective healing, and liberation in the United States and globally.
She is YWCA Madison’s CEO after six years of directing the Race and Gender department. Gery’s connection to YWCA Madison goes back to 2012 when she first volunteered as a facilitator for the Racial Justice series. She later joined the organization as a Race and Gender Equity Coordinator and Manager before becoming the Director of this same department. Under her leadership, this department continued to grow a community of artists, advocates, organizers, educators, and practitioners as collaborators in co-creating offerings such as YWCA Madison’s annual Racial Justice Summit.
Like many Latine people, Gery was born to families of mixed ethnicities and races due to colonization: Indigenous Quechua, Aymara, and Guarani with European Spanish. This reality shapes her personal journey of learning, unlearning, and healing as well as continues to inspire her work for intersectional justice and collective liberation every day.
In the twenty years of her professional practice, Gery has collaborated with people, communities, and organizations worldwide. These experiences gave her the opportunity to co-create programs, build capacity, and co-facilitate learning experiences that deliberately centered social justice with young and adult populations from a vast range of race, ethnic, gender, socioeconomic, and ideological identities in countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, United States, Swaziland, Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, and Italy.
In the past, Gery has served as the Co-Curricular Director of United World College in Costa Rica, presided over the International Association for Experiential Education, as well as co-founded the community organization Wayna Hilaña Yanapaña together with youth peers in her home country of Bolivia. She is a United World College of India graduate, where she received a full scholarship to participate in a two-year multicultural and international residential experience centering education for peace while living and learning with two hundred peers from eighty-two countries. She received a bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Social Justice Education from Prescott College and an Executive Certificate in Social Impact Strategy from the University of Pennsylvania.
As a passionate lifelong learner, she loves to continue participating in multiple community-based learning, unlearning, and practice experiences. She also enjoys time in Nature, dancing to live music, and connecting with people and cultures at home and via traveling.