Member Spotlight: An Interview with Natalia Martinez-Kalinina
by Lynare Robbins
Global Ties Miami recognizes November as both a month marking the U.S. Elections, and also a month marking the important role that civic engagement plays when American citizens vote. In this issue of our Member Spotlight, we have the opportunity to speak with civic engagement leader, innovation strategist and ecosystem builder, Natalia Martinez-Kalinina.
Natalia is of Cuban and Russian descent and grew up in Mexico City, Mexico. “I was born in Cuba, to a Russian mother and a Cuban father, and I lived there until the age of six. My family left Cuba in 1992, moving to Mexico City, where we lived until we came to the U.S. five years later.” Natalia shared that living in Mexico was a transformative experience in part because it is a very different amalgamation of cultures from her Russian and Cuban backgrounds, and in part because it exposed her to a much broader pan-Latino-American reality. “I am very proud to be of Cuban descent but growing up in Mexico taught me that I can add to my identity, and that this growth by addition can be an enriching and joyful experience.” She says that she became a professional while living and studying in New York and considers herself as an Argentine at heart. “At this colorful intersection, I am a person who cares very deeply about bridging gaps, who always has too many new hobbies and projects, and who considers themselves at home nowhere and everywhere. To steal a line from John F. Kennedy, Jr., I would say I consider myself an optimist without illusions,” says Natalia.
As the General Manager & Latin America Lead at CIC Miami for five years, she also founded the organizations, Immigrant Powered, and the Awesome Foundation MIAMI, which has since awarded $110K+ in grants to small, grassroots ideas across Miami. She is also the co-founder of Aminta Ventures, an educational vehicle focused on educating and empowering professional and philanthropic women to become angel investors. “The mission behind Immigrant Powered is three-fold: to highlight the positive economic impact of immigrants in our communities, to empower ‘immigrant powered’ businesses, and to connect small/medium businesses with opportunities for advocacy around responsible immigration policy,” explains Natalia.
Natalia elaborates that the primary lens for everything that she does is informed by her foundation as an organizational psychologist. She is interested in group behavior, in one way or another. “Most recently, my work has focused on merging innovation, entrepreneurship, and community impact.” Natalia added that over the last five years CIC was underpinned by a strong mission focused on creating a more connected and vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem in South Florida. Her work as the person in charge of expansion and growth was to oversee the core business, master plan an innovation district by setting a joint agenda between public, academic, and private actors, and design the strategic priorities we addressed (life sciences and Latin America engagement, for instance). “In addition to my professional trajectory, I have focused on founding organizations that help bridge gaps in our local community.”
When discussing how her industry is navigating the COVID-19 pandemic and what is being implemented to meet the needs and challenges communities are currently facing, Natalia says that innovation districts are naturally places that thrive off of convergence, so the effects of the pandemic have been palpable in so far as it has changed how or where individuals and companies work, and how much individuals are gathering (or not). “The pandemic has also placed many segments of our communities in different economic circumstances than expected, heavily affecting the entrepreneurial sector, and created a heightened and justified awareness of health and safety across the board.” Natalia says that as a result, innovation communities have had to wrestle with several large topics. The first focus has been ensuring that physical spaces and all accompanying infrastructure change to make users more comfortable from a public health perspective. In some instances, this requires pretty dramatic operational changes (for co-working spaces, for instance) around everything from layouts and air filtration systems to contact tracing, on-site testing, and different protocols for just about every process. Natalia says that the second area of focus has been how to revisit the intention mission of these projects under the current limitation. “Programming and resources have shifted to online content, learning opportunities have focused on how to thrive/adjust to the current conditions, and certain types of innovation have been incentivized over others. As innovation communities across the country and the world prepare for 2021, there is still plenty of uncertainty about how entrepreneurs and innovators can recover, how social impact organizations can adapt, how R&D commercialization can continue, and how gatherings, collective engagements, and shared experiences will adapt.”
While Natalia says that innovation is a very broad, umbrella term, it can encompass everything from cutting edge scientific research to a community member creating grassroots solutions to hyperlocal issues in their immediate surroundings. She emphasizes that it is important to realize that innovation can happen not just through invention, but also through the translation of ideas from one context to another. “It is also critical to realize that innovation infrastructure is not evenly shared across our cities, and that although talent is distributed, opportunity often isn’t. In this context, expanding social and physical infrastructure helps us address both of the aforementioned dimensions, first by creating centers of gravity — where convergence, learning, serendipity, and cross-pollination are more likely to occur — and secondly by creating spaces that service and support both cutting edge advancements in science, innovation, or business as well as giving access and opportunity to segments of the community that may not often have it.” Natalia warns that these are not mutually exclusive objectives and says that the overlapping segment of their Venn Diagram is where we can truly revitalize and re-energize cities.
As Natalia has written articles pertaining to expanding opportunities for economic growth in Miami, when it comes to strategy and how community members can support these kinds of initiatives so that they go from being ideas to reality, she points out, “Economic development is a complex topic to navigate, in part because it lives at the intersection of the public and private sectors, and finding alignment across those many actors is often cumbersome. Personally, I have chosen to focus on entrepreneurship as an economic development tool, so my strategy has been to support entrepreneurial education and access, access to small business resources, helping small companies scale, and finding funding opportunities.” Natalia says that small businesses represent 99% — an overwhelming majority — of employers in the U.S., so supporting the formation, growth, and capacity of entrepreneurial ventures tends to ripple out as diverse forms of economic development impact across communities.
Overall, she says that the kind of holistic thinking that is required to truly expand opportunities for economic growth involves integrating many interests and stakeholders. “Although I can understand how some of this can feel onerous to community members, I would argue there are plenty of topics that individual citizens can become knowledgeable about and advocate for with their local governments and economic development agencies. One salient example is the possibility presented by opportunity zones. Civic engagement is critical on these topics, and regular residents can absolutely have a voice in how these resources are levied.”
When asked to explain the difference between equality and equity, Natalia explained, “Thank you for asking this question; it is a great example of why semantics matter, especially as we look at nuanced topics. Both equality and equity revolve around fairness, but they differ in their implementation.” She added that equality achieves fairness by suggesting we treat everyone the same. Equity, however, argues that we achieve fairness by treating people differently depending on their needs, circumstances, and contexts. “Equity does not undermine equality; rather, one can argue it provides the means to achieve it. If equality is the ultimate goal on any given dimension, equity may be the avenue for getting there.”
One of the most pressing issues that Natalia feels that change makers in Miami should be focused on is collaboration. “Working together, building alignment and consensus across stakeholders with different interests has always been a complex matter for any society. But currently, given the number of real challenges and tangible opportunities for a city like Miami, if we cannot learn to collaborate better — across academic institutions, public sector interests, private stakeholders, the entrepreneurial and impact sectors, we are paying an opportunity cost that is simply too high. I believe our most pressing issue is thinking holistically and collaboratively as a foundation across the board.” Natalia adds that the status of innovation among Latin American entrepreneurs is thriving and the possibilities for collaboration are endless. “Latin America is a region of great plurality of thought, and despite its size and some marked historical macroeconomic and political obstacles, I believe very ardently in the Latin American entrepreneur, and I am deeply passionate about Miami playing a better role of connector and bridge-builder across the hemisphere, for their benefit as well as ours.”
Natalia shared that she has lived in Cuba, Russia, and Mexico, but has spent significant time in France, Argentina, Israel, and South Africa over the years. “I have also traveled to Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Chile, China, the United Kingdom, as well as more neighboring countries such as Colombia and Guatemala. My favorite places are St. Petersburg, the Argentine Patagonia, the Tuscan countryside, and some nooks of the Western Cape in South Africa.”
As a member of Global Ties Miami, Natalia says that she found out about the organization through engagements with CIC, as they hosted delegations for tours and discussions about Miami’s entrepreneurial milieu. “Over time, I became increasingly aware of the organization’s work, and after I gave a keynote at the Diplomacy Begins Here Summit in Miami, I was determined to become more involved.” In Natalia’s view on the importance of international diplomacy and programs like the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), she says, “Public diplomacy has time and time again proven to be an important tool in connecting societies. It has played a role over the course of history in more ways than we can count, both formally and informally.” She added that we live in an increasingly interconnected world in which many of our challenges and opportunities are inextricably connected. “In this context, understanding other societies — their priorities, threats, opportunities, contributions — is critical to finding ways to build solutions that are cross-national and cross-cultural. As such, I am an ardent proponent of public diplomacy programs, and consider it a privilege and a pleasure to help support them!”
