We're thrilled to share that we've awarded the Conspiring Women Impact Award to Natalia Machuca! Through our programs, women develop deep peer coaching converstations and expand there networks.  Members of Conspiring Women were invited to nominate others in the network for the Impact Award.

Here's the award description:  So many of you are out there making a difference in the world, and yet we know that a lot of this work goes unrecognized. Through Conspire's programs, you've likely met someone whose work in the world is important and inspiring to you. This is your chance to elevate their work and their impact among members of our community and beyond.

Our awardee, Natalia, was nominated by her peer coach through the Conspiring Women Peer Coaching Co-Op, Colleen Kineen. Here's what Colleen wrote in  her nomination:

"When you are in Natalia's presence, you immediately sense the depth and power of her soul. To me, she epitomizes what it means to be a strong female leader. Authentic, soulful, adept at holding space and developing vision that motivates those around her and spurs them to action. Natalia innately serves as a lighthouse for those around her, using her own light to guide others to step into their full potential from a place of love and possibility. I believe that Natalia is deserving of the Impact Award (or a new award that I'd call the Soulful Leader award) for her courageous strength in showing up in her full light and in so doing, enabling others to do the same. This to me is the strength of a true leader but is a model of leadership that isn't often overtly recognized or valued. Keep your eyes on Natalia, she's just getting started and is sure to continue to create the most powerful of waves through her life's work and the ways she continually inspires others."

Thank you, Colleen, for this beautiful nomination.  In Nataila's honor, we've planted trees via TreeSisters to support women and indigenous led reforestation initiatives in critical forests.  We invite you to honor Natalia by contributing to this reforestation initiative as well.

We hope you'll take a few minutes to learn more about Natalia's inspirational work in public health - a field I know we all deeply appreciate more than ever.

Natalia Machuca

Natalia Machuca has 15 years of experience in public health, including 13 years in federal government service at the National Institutes of Health and the U.S Agency for International Development (USAID). Ms. Machuca joined USAID in 2010 as an Infectious Disease Advisor in the Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean supporting Malaria, Tuberculosis, Emerging Pandemic Threats, and Neglected Tropical Diseases in the Latin American and Caribbean region.  While in that role, she also worked on the response to Haiti’s Cholera outbreak and the regional response to Zika. In 2016, Ms. Machuca joined the Bureau for Global Health's Neglected Tropical Diseases Division, first as a Senior Operations Officer and later became the Deputy Division Chief.  Ms. Machuca has supported various Bureau for Global Health efforts, including the recent COVID-19 commodity shipments to India and Brazil.  Ms. Machuca recently joined the U.S. President Malaria Initiative as the USAID's Malaria Division's Deputy Division Chief.  

Prior to USAID, Ms. Machuca worked as an Infectious Disease Specialist at the Association of Public Health Laboratories where she supported the domestic response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic.  Before attending graduate school, Ms. Machuca received an Intramural Research Training Award to work at National Institutes of Health for two years.

Ms. Machuca is deeply committed to public service, and strives to foster a healthy work culture.  She speaks fluent Spanish, is a long-distance runner and yogi, and holds a Master’s of Science in Public Health Microbiology and Emerging Infectious Diseases from George Washington University.

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For a decade, Conspire has grounded our coaching programs for women leaders in our core commitments to 1)  nurturing collective resilience (i.e. we need each other to be resilient) so that we can  2) sustain and fully unleash the untapped potential of women in leadership towards solving the world’s most significant problems.

As we enter into our second decade, our coaching practice has evolved along with the coaching field with an even more urgent commitment to deepening our collective consciousness about what Peter Hawkins describes as the “Seven Interconnected Global Challenges: Climate emergency, Air, sea & soil degradation, Loss of biodiversity, Mono-culture & control, Increasing mental distress, Human prejudice, and Widening inequality. We understand the well-documented evidence that investing in women’s education and leadership in all of these areas is one of the key ways we will mitigate harm and create a resilient future for future generations.

So as we enter our second decade, we will be even more explicit about being a regenerative, women-centered, coaching practice and we invite all of our stakeholders to hold us to this commitment. A major new initiative is partnering with TreeSisters to support women-led reforestation initiatives in critical eco-systems. Each time you enroll in one of our coaching programs, we will plant a tree via TreeSisters. We invite you to top up this donation whenever you can so that Conspiring Women can stand behind the women who are regenerating the lungs and biodiversity of our planet. 

Thank you for conspiring together for a decade and here’s to new decade that will reveal our collective ability to rise to this urgent moment. Let’s grow a Conspiring Women forest!


More info on TreeSisters below:


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Why Trees, Why Now? Trees offer humanity one of the most crucial ecosystem services available to us at this phase of our evolution. Currently global warming is threatening all life on Earth. While we figure out how to reduce carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the forests of our world are drawing it down into their roots, branches, boughs and leaves. They are invaluable in helping to cool us down. To provide any viable hope for future generations, we need to replace deforestation with a reforestation revolution. We can't wait for governments to lead the way. Together, we are restoring forests in 10+ major ecosystems including those in Madagascar, India, Brazil, Kenya, and Nepal, Mozambique, West Papua and Cameroon. 

We plant trees to restore ecosystems and livelihoods whilst increasing protection against the extremes of climate change in multiple regions of the tropical forest belt. We do this in ways that recreate and restore natural forest ecosystems using indigenous species, fostering local knowledge and skills, and promoting women's participation. We strive to do it intelligently, appropriately, respectfully and successfully. 

Forests play a vital role in the hydrological cycles of our world, sequestering the atmospheric carbon dioxide that is driving climate change. When trees are removed, vibrant ecosystems are often overfarmed, eroded and rendered infertile in a cascade effect that is mirrored with social decline, grinding poverty and climate extremes. Reforestation can rapidly reverse these trends, stabilizing and nourishing the soils, restoring watersheds, revitalizing dry springs and providing good quality water to large populations living downstream. 
You can read more about our Reforestation approach and our Reforestation Partners on the homepage of our website.