Cristina M. Miranda Palacios is a social and community planner.

She currently serves as the Founding Executive Director of the League of Cities, a nonprofit nonpartisan organization that aims to strengthen the capacity of local governments and communities on the island in the face of social, physical, fiscal, and governance challenges.

She is also a co-founder of the Third Mission Institute of the Albizu University, where she served as the Director of Planning and Development and a member of the Executive Committee, where she currently serves as Senior Consultant. At the Institute she co-directed a portfolio of over 45 applied research projects with a budget of over 6.5 million dollars. As part of the projects she oversaw at the Institute, she served as the Executive Director of the Municipal Alliance for Education and the Programa Futuro, a collaboration that started between 4 municipalities and that expanded to 8, with a proposed impact of over 3,000 students in a proven afterschool program that was focused on the transformation of the community through the education of its students and the engagement of families.

She completed her Master’s in Urban and Social Community Planning, with honors, from the University of Maryland in College Park (2003), where she received the prestigious Lefrak Award for service to the
community, and where she also completed a graduate degree in Historic Preservation. In 2015 she completed a Graduate Certificate of Community Development from Rutgers University, Camden campus, and in 2008 a Public Policy Certificate from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus. She is currently completing her doctoral studies at the Center for Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, where she will complete her doctorate in history and philosophy. Her area of interest is the impact of partisan politics on the development of social policies.
 
As part of her commitment to social justice and equality, for the past 16 years, Cristina has been a fervent collaborator of Puerto Rico’s biggest Homeless Continuum of Care, run by CoDeCo. She also collaborates with other nonprofit and community-based organizations with planning sessions and the development of funding campaigns. She is currently the President of the Trust for the Development of Río Piedras, an entity tasked with the revitalization and development of the communities of Río Piedras, with a participatory planning approach, in the domains of culture, education, housing, economic development, security and community participation, among others.
 
Before returning to Puerto Rico in 2003, Cristina lived in Washington, DC, where she completed a professional internship at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Office of Environmental Justice. She also worked as second in command at the Executive Office of the Mayor, Office of Latino Affairs, and at the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Institute, where she oversaw the development of alliances and identifying funding to support Latinos in higher education. She also founded and presided el taller D…,
a consulting company that specialized in the areas of planning, capacity development, design, implementation and evaluation of programs, and proposal development, among other services.