Our Story
We are committed to working with partners and communities to eradicate all forms of violence and build more loving, peaceful, and just multi-cultural societies.
BridgePeople partners with a diverse group of global consultants with a broad set of professional and lived experiences. Accessing wisdom from different communities and experiences strengthens our impact. Our partners are all deeply committed to our values of shared humanity, radical love, and advancing peace through justice.
BridgePeople was born in 2019 in response to the concerning escalation of violence in our public discourse. To this day, toxic 'leadership' models at the highest levels of public and private governance in our society continue to enable the perfect conditions for increasing violence and ongoing harm of communities at home and abroad.
Othering people outside of euro-centric dominant culture has served as a justification for violence against communities perceived as less deserving of life, freedom, and self-determination.
We believe that at the root of all poverty and injustice is structural violence designed to discriminate and exclude certain portions of a population for the benefit of others. We need a different approach if we want different results.
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We could choose to value humans and relationships over outcomes and institutions.
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We could choose a strong stance against violence and any parts of our culture that promote or justify harm to any human being, including those who are different from us.
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We could choose to unlearn fear, hatred, and greed.
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We could choose love for all humanity.
At BridgePeople, we choose love. We research, reclaim, and employ the wisdom of great teachers in all the ancestral lineages and faith traditions that lived and taught the practices of love, faith, and hope for our collective healing, liberation, and transformation.
By targeting systems and structures, never people, we uphold the transformative nonviolence teachings of great leaders such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, who respectively raised our collective consciousness to our deep inter-connectedness and inter-being.
We invite you, as an individual, community, or organization, to join us:
Join us in unlearning and divesting from all forms of coercion, violence, domination, and injustice.
Join us in investing in new ways of being, working, and relating, building bridges between how the world is and how it could be.
Join us in advancing our collective healing and liberation through reclaiming lost or stolen cultural wisdom and lovingly tending to our personal, collective, and ancestral wounds.
Let's build the collective power to transform relationships, organizations, systems, and structures and create possibilities for free and peaceful tomorrows.
Meet the Founder
Itzbeth Menjívar, Founder & CEO
Itzbeth Menjívar has been building bridges between cultures in the private, public, and philanthropic sectors for more than 25 years.
Itzbeth began her career as a supervising consultant leading risk management projects for the world's largest multinational corporations and financial services firms for more than ten years. A deep calling to serve communities forced into poverty by structural violence led her to Washington DC to pursue a career in global public service.
For over a decade Itzbeth built and deepened relationships across the Global South with the aim of promoting shared prosperity, equity, and justice. In November 2016, she awoke to the realization that equity and justice were also sorely needed in the United States, expanding her interest and perspectives beyond the International Development field.
Itzbeth founded BridgePeople in 2019 with the hopes of supporting leaders in building impactful and equitable multi-cultural teams. BridgePeople has supported organizations big and small in transforming their cultures and structures to align better with their values and increase the effectiveness of their work. BridgePeople is now focusing on equipping leaders for the eradication of violence in our society and the co-creation of free and peaceful tomorrows.
Born and raised in the part of Abya Yala colonized as Central America, Itzbeth identifies as an Afro-Indigenous Black woman. She is a dedicated student of her own lineage's ancestral wisdom and faith traditions, and proudly advocates for inter-faith and multi-faith respect, solidarity, and harmony. Itzbeth is committed to unleashing the power of love and connection in both secular and faith-based spaces.
Itzbeth is trained as an Interfaith Movement Chaplain, is certified as a Mindful Leader, and has been deepening her studies as a Healing-Centered (Trauma-Informed) Leader, Coach, and Consultant since 2019. She also completed the Inner MBA program in May 2023, a program designed for conscious leaders to integrate spirituality and business to achieve exceptional results. Itzbeth is a member of the Spiritual Directors of Color Network and enjoys providing spiritual companionship to people of diverse faiths or no faith.
Itzbeth holds a bachelor's degree in Finance and a Master of Science in International Development. She speaks four languages and has a special place in her heart for plants and animals.
