Profiles

Juana Bordas is president of Mestiza Leadership International and was founding president of Mi Casa Resource Center which is Colorado’s largest Latino serving organization. For her extensive work with Latinas, she was commended by Latina Style Magazine for creating “a Nation of Latina Leaders.”

Juana emigrated to the U.S. from Nicaragua on a banana boat. The youngest daughter in a family of eight, she was the first to go to college. She learned leadership from her hard-working parents especially her mother, Maria, who cooked food and scrubbed floors in the school lunchroom so Juana could get a scholarship to a Catholic school.

Her book Salsa, Soul, and Spirit: Leadership for a Multicultural Age won the International Latino Book Award for leadership. The Power of Latino Leadership won the Nautilus Award for best indigenous book. She was a contributor to the NY Times best seller: Peter Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions.

Juana was the first Latina faculty at the Center for Creative Leadership. She served as advisor to Harvard’s Hispanic Journal on Public Policy, the Kellogg National Fellows, vice chair of the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, and trustee of the International Leadership Association. In 2019 she was the first Latina honored with the Life-Time Achievement Award from the International Leadership.

The National Center for Women’s Policy Studies honored her as a Wise Woman. She was inducted into The Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame.