Board of Directors

Elizabeth Luna, AIF® is a Director of Wealth Management at ARIA Wealth Management, Inc.  Elizabeth has always had a deep passion for empowering women around finance. She knows firsthand the meaningful victories that both men and women can experience when taking charge of their financial life.  Elizabeth provides her clients expert guidance in wealth management, estate planning and customized portfolio management.  A Bay Area native, Elizabeth is a graduate of Santa Clara University and resides in the Rose Garden area of San Jose with her husband and 3 children.

Kim is a Community Organizer with Showing Up for Racial Justice, a group of South Bay people who organize, mobilize, and educate White folks and other folks with privilege for racial justice. She is the former Grants Manager at the Leo M. Shortino Family Foundation, which makes grants to organizations that support at-risk youth in education and the arts, and she spent 15 years consulting with Hewlett-Packard, helping them market their servers and PCs. Her passion exactly matches GFS’s: to launch low-income, first-generation students on a trajectory to success.  Kim holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Arizona, a Master’s of International Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management, and an M.A. in Organizational Communication from Purdue.

Tom is a Senior Director at FTI Consulting and is based in San Francisco. He is a member of the Dispute Advisory Services practice and uses his experience and background in accounting and economics to provide litigation consulting and business advisory services. Tom is a graduate of the University of California at Davis, where he received a B.S. in Managerial Economics. He is a licensed CPA in the state of California.

Karla Alvarez (pronouns: she/ella) is the Equity and Inclusion Services Manager for San José Public Library, steering projects to better serve San José’s historically underrepresented and underserved communities. She is a seasoned nonprofit executive, with more than fifteen years of experience leading domestic and international projects to strengthen youth leadership, gender equity, immigrant justice and human rights. She served as Executive Director of Mixteca Organization in Brooklyn, New York and in other leadership positions for projects in Mexico, Guatemala and other countries. She proudly supports Latinx community-building initiatives in Silicon Valley, also serving on the board of directors for Latino Leadership Alliance. Karla received her Master’s degree in international Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame and Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from the University of San Diego.

Smitha is COO & Co-founder of Ounce of Care, which provides support to residents of affordable housing with the mission of improving community health and wellbeing. Prior to that, she spent over 10 years in consulting, most recently as a Senior Manager at Bain & Company. She also has experience in IT & technology from her time at the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and as a Senior Product Manager at Amazon. Smitha holds a B.S. and M.S. in Bioengineering from UPenn and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.