Check out 'A Conversation with Renata' in the
Nashville Business Journal (May, 2008).
Renata Soto is co-founder and Executive Director of Conexión Américas.
She is from Costa Rica and has lived in the United States since 1993. She has been in Nashville since 1996.
Renata has always worked and volunteered for social and economic justice causes.
After finishing college, she started her nonprofit career as Community Relations Coordinator for the Latin American Association, the largest Hispanic nonprofit social service organization in Atlanta.
Once in Nashville, Renata worked for United Way of Metropolitan Nashville for more than five years. She managed a grant-making portfolio of almost $1.5 million, including that United Way's first grants to programs serving immigrants and refugees. In her last role at United Way, Renata was director of an initiative to support and expand a network of family resource centers in low-income neighborhoods in Nashville.
While working at United Way, Renata produced and co-hosted an educational call-in radio show targeting recent Latino immigrants in one of the NashvilleâÂÂs Spanish radio stations --then Radio MelodÃÂas-- for over four years as a volunteer project.
She was also one of the lead organizers of the first-ever research project aiming to understand the experience of Latinos in Nashville conducted in 2000 (Encuentro Latino/Latino Encounter).
Renata was recently appointed to serve on the Board of Directors of the National Council of La Raza --the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States.
Currently she serves on the Mayor's Advisory Council on Immigrants and Refugees and on the steering committees of Nashville for All of Us and of the Coalition for Education about Immigration. Renata is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Nonprofit Management and of the Tennessee Justice for Our Neighbors Project. In addition, she serves on the board of trustees of her children's school, Abintra Montessori School.
Renata obtained a bachelorâÂÂs degree in Communications from the University of Costa Rica. She also attended Kenyon College, in Ohio, as a one-year visiting student and did graduate coursework at Georgia State University, in Atlanta, Georgia.
She and her husband, Pete Wooten, have two children, Gabriel and Camila.