Ep 11: Maria Teresa Kumar, Voto Latino: The Biggest Democratic Opportunity

Meet Maria Teresa Kumar, co-founder and President of Voto Latino Foundation.  She has co-created a revolution for good and a coalition in America that says, "not on our watch".  The Latino vote is shifting the progressive movement and serving as a catalyst across the country.  Voto Latino has played a significant part over the last twenty years in increasing Latino voters turnout by 31%.

Elisa Parker speaks with Kumar about how they engaged the 2nd largest demographic in the United States, including educating and connecting with young voters.  She talks about working within the system, how the system works for us when we're in the game; utilizing our superpowers and sharing their winning strategy.   

Hosted by nationally acclaimed radio host and Equal Voices/ERA Coalition, Elisa Parker, Equality Talks bridges the intersections of equality, justice, and social activism to unify as a collective and change the status quo.  

Equality Talks focuses on the key facets of equality across all communities, including everything from gender, racial, economic and reproductive justice, to labor, immigrant, and LGBTQ+ rights. 

For more information on Equality Talks go to www.ERACoaltion.org and www.EqualVoice.org. 

Moving from silos to solidarity.

The ERA Coalition was founded in 2014 to bring concerted, organized action to the effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA Coalition has a sister organization, the Fund for Women’s Equality, which promotes public education and outreach on the need for constitutional equality. Composed of more than 290 organizations across the country representing millions of people, the Coalition is a movement of movements focused on overall equality in the United States.  

While the effort to amend the constitution to include sex equality began nearly a century ago, our renewed efforts are centered on women of color (African American, Asian American/Pacific Islander, Latina, and Native American), gender-nonconforming and transgender women and girls, and nonbinary people – those who are most impacted by systemic inequities.  

 
www.eracoalition.org | www.fundforwomensequality.org

About Maria Teresa:

María Teresa Kumar is the co-founder and President of Voto Latino Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan 501(c)(3) organization, and its sister 501(c)(4 ) advocacy organization, Voto Latino. Voto Latino Foundation and Voto Latino are the largest Latino voter registration and Latino youth advocacy organizations in the country, respectively. Together, Voto Latino Foundation and Voto Latino, jointly known as Voto Latino, have registered over 1.4 million Americans in key battleground states since 2004, 79% of whom went on to vote. 

Latinos are the fastest-growing demographic in the United States, and Voto Latino’s work has directly led to a substantial expansion of the Latino electorate in key states like Arizona and Nevada. Voto Latino has pioneered the use of technology, social media, and influencers to effectively register voters and counter disinformation at an unprecedented scale. Voto Latino reaches over 6 million Americans each month and has spent more than $100 million to ensure all Americans can participate in our democracy. 

For this work, Fast Company named María Teresa one of the 100 Most Creative Minds, and the Analyst Institute recognized Voto Latino with an Expy Award for expanding the field of voter registration. 

A sought-after political leader and strategist, María Teresa advised President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and she currently serves on the National Task Force on Election Crises and the Brookings Institution’s Working Group on Universal Voting. She is chair of the Latino Anti-Disinformation Lab. 

María Teresa is also an Emmy-nominated analyst for MSNBC and serves on the boards of Steve Madden, Emily’s List, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Additionally, she is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. 

She has been named among Bloomberg’s 100 Influential Latinos, Washingtonian Magazine’s 100 Top Political Influencers, and Elle’s 10 influential women in Washington. The Hispanic Heritage Foundation, Hispanic Executive Magazine, Latino Leaders Magazine, and Hispanic Business have all honored María Teresa. 

Raised in Sonoma, California, María Teresa lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, Raj Kumar, and their two children. She is a first-generation graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the University of California, Davis.

Voto Latino