Ana María Archila
Co-Executive Director, Make the Road New York
Ana María Archila is the co-executive director of Make the Road New York. A native of Colombia, Ana María immigrated to the US at the age of 17. She has emerged as an important immigrant advocate for civil rights, health care access and education reform in New York City.
Since 2003, Ana María worked to build grassroots power in immigrant communities as the executive director of the Latin American Integration Center, and now as co-executive director of Make the Road New York.
Today, Make the Road New York is the largest membership-led immigrant organization in New York City, with over 8,000 dues-paying members, who are primarily low-income Latino/a immigrants, and offices in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.
Far from City Hall, on the hardscrabble streets of Bushwick, and in the immigrant bustle of Jackson Heights and Port Richmond, Make the Road New York is successfully putting into practice a new model for winning economic and political opportunity, and shaping New York City’s civic agenda through a combination of education, leadership development, civic participation, and base-building community organizing with strategic public policy work on a broad range of issues, from environmental justice to workplace rights and civil rights.