Alize has been driven by the idea that, "to whom much is given, much is expected" and that it is our duty to consistently reach back, give back, and help our communities up along our personal journey to greatness. With this as her personal mantra, she has worked over the past 12 years to ensure that her professional career and personal endeavors have always rooted back to the community.
In the summer of 2015 Alize Garcia departed from her role as the Manhattan Borough Director under Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration. She subsequently joined Big Brothers Big Sisters of NYC, the nation’s oldest and New York City’s largest mentoring organization. Having spent time working closely with diverse communities in NYC, Alize knew that in order for her to have a personal and deeper impact, specifically with the youth, her work needed to move closer to people that she truly wanted to impact. Joining Big Brothers Big Sisters of NYC as the Community Outreach Manager was perfectly aligned with that goal. She was tasked with the mission to diversify the mentors recruited into the agency and build strategic partnerships that would aid in the development of impactful programming for the youth in the organization.
After being promoted to Associate Director of Outreach and Recruitment, Alize realized that the need for more volunteers of color was not just specific to Big Brothers Big Sisters of NYC, many nonprofit organizations were on a similar quest and were coming up short. Alize however knew that the solution to finding prospective mentors of color required the organization to properly align and market themselves directly to the audience they wanted to recruit. She began developing partnerships with community organization and corporate African American Employee Resource Groups such as Google, JP Morgan, Ernst and Young, Facebook, American Express, Dropbox, SiriusX, etc. which ultimately resulted in a 35% increase of African American volunteers for Big Brothers Big Sisters of NYC.
This experience of working to recruit volunteers of color, led to a breakthrough in thought. Alize realized the opportunity to impact the way African Americans find volunteer opportunities thus changing the current narrative of how African Americans give of their time and money versus their counterparts. Through rigorous research Alize found that there are thousands on thousands of volunteer websites, but none that spoke directly to people of color. This conclusion sparked the birth of We Give Too. Her goal is to change the face of philanthropy one volunteer at a time.
