Meet Our New Trustees (Fall 2022)
October 20, 2022
Reverend Fabiola Grandon-Mayer is the Prairie North district superintendent in the Northern Illinois Conference. She is a certified public accountant and holds an MDiv from Asbury Seminary. She has held leadership positions in the church at local, regional, national, and international levels. She was the coordinator for the Volunteers in Mission Teams in Chile, promoting and bringing teams from the United States to Chile to build temples and parsonages. She also led the Council for United Methodist Churches in Latin America for 11 years. Grandon-Mayer has offered to help Garrett-Evangelical strengthen the Hispanic/Latinx presence in the Northern Illinois Conference.
Maria Alejandra Salazar (G-ETS 2019) is a Program Officer at Borealis Philanthropy, a social justice philanthropic intermediary working to resource grassroots movements for transformative change. A 1.5 generation, formerly undocumented immigrant, her professional background began with community organizing, advocacy, and direct social services with immigrant communities in the Chicagoland area. Maria Alejandra received her Bachelor of Science in Education and Social Policy with a minor in Latina/o Studies from Northwestern University. She received her Master of Divinity from Garrett-Evangelical, focusing her capstone project on women of color organizers and burnout. Her vocation centers on art, justice, and ancestral connection.
Julia Wyatt works as the chief operating officer for Tiptree, Inc., a publicly traded financial services company in New York City. She has served as the CFO or COO of several large publicly traded companies and has also worked in capital management for global firms like Deloitte and Morgan. She is a member of Christ Church (UMC) in New York City, where she has sung in the choir, chaired the Outreach Ministries Committee, and is the co-founder of the church’s microfinance ministry in Cartagena, Colombia. This ministry provides capital funding for informal entrepreneurs, mostly single mothers, in the Flor de Campo neighborhood—an area that largely consists of people displaced by climatic events, political violence, or the international narcotics trade. She is a University of Utah alum, with a degree in accountancy and public finance. She has extensive experience serving on public and non-profit boards.