Alejandra Guzman
Vice President of Program Development and Strategy, New Orleans Business Alliance
Alejandra Guzman has a passion for creating positive social change, and the Crescent City is benefiting from her seemingly endless drive.
Guzman is on the board of Fund 17, which works to combat opportunity inequality in the 17 wards of New Orleans by providing financial and educational tools to entrepreneurs who otherwise would not have access to the resources and knowledge necessary to grow their enterprises. She was also part of the Young Leadership Council’s COP NOLA program, which earned $5,000 in seed money to develop a free workshop series to help NOPD applicants in the application process and preparing for Civil Service exams.
While these examples would be a career for many, they are just two of her extracurricular activities.
As vice president of program development and strategy at The New Orleans Business Alliance (NOLABA), she has been working to reposition New Orleans’ brand as the ideal intersection of commerce and culture. The ProsperityNOLA program is a comprehensive economic development plan and catalyst for economic transformation, which builds upon the city’s economic cornerstones — its people, innate culture and geographic advantages — to create jobs and wealth for all New Orleanians. Additionally, she is involved in the development of a holistic talent cultivation and management strategy to attract the best and brightest to the Crescent City, and to engage and retain them and their families.
“The No. 1 reason a business decides to relocate to a region is the availability of qualified talent,” Guzman said.
“Talent attraction and retention are extremely important for economic development because the better equipped a community is to attract skill and retain talent, the better it will fare in attracting businesses.”
