Our Team

We are a diverse set of
multi-disciplinary practitioners working at the intersection of planning, engagement, and equity.

Wilnelia Rivera

Founder & CEO (she/her)

Wilnelia Rivera, Founder & CEO of Rivera Consulting Inc. (RC), is an urban planner and equity strategist with a 21-year track record of success and results focused on the nexus and connectivity between people, public and private organizations, and places. Through her work and lived experience, Wilnelia has come to understand that the most important economic and social issues are intersectional and interconnected but require different mindsets, collaboration, and adaptability to address them. Her north stars are prototyping values-driven ideas and solutions while fostering buy-in and trust for leaders, teams, and communities to advance their mission and outcomes.

Before founding RC in 2015, Wilnelia was a history-making community organizer, advocate, and political strategist across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. RC is a Boston-based management and strategy consultant firm working at the intersection of planning, engagement, and equity. With an asset-driven, mixed-method research approach RC has worked with non-profit organizations, government agencies, and private companies to apply equity to advance innovative solutions to complex cultural and structural problems. The cornerstone of RC’s approach is Deep Democracy — a value and a methodology that tends to the whole, the underrepresented, experts, and decision-makers to unpack nodes of connectivity and innovation. Through this framework, all practitioners at RC deploy rigorous and human centered design thinking practices to ensure those often left out of the public commons are centered in our research, facilitation, and organizational development products.

Raised in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and resident of Boston, her leadership has been recognized by Boston Magazine in 2022 and 2021, as one of Boston’s Top 100 Influential Bostonians, and the Tufts University Alumni Magazine. She holds both a B.A. in International Relations, B.A. in Women's Studies (2004) and an M.A. in Urban and Environmental Policy & Planning from Tufts University (2014). In 2021, she received the Lyon & Bendheim Citizenship Award from Tisch College of Civic Life.
She also serves as a Board of Advisor at Tisch College of Civic Life, a Board member of the Massachusetts Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, a member of the Eastern Bank Board of Ambassadors, and Secretary on Board of Directors of the Rare Ensemble Foundation.

Sheila Encarnación Castillo

Equity Researcher & Project Manager (she/her/ella)

Sheila Encarnación Castillo is a researcher and public policy specialist with over eight years of experience in multisectoral coalition building, human rights advocacy, humanitarian programme management, and qualitative research.

Sheila is a mixed methods qualitative researcher at Rivera Consulting where she has been able to put into practice her skills in qualitative analysis, in-depth interview process design and implementation, policy analysis, programme evaluation, and project management through a wide array of urban planning and organizational development projects.

Her past experiences include being a researcher and a project manager in strategic planning processes with both private and public actors, as well as being a researcher for community engagement design and internal equity assessments with various municipalities across Massachusetts.
In her previous role as a Protection Assistant at the UN agency for refugees, Sheila served as a liaison between social movement organizations, government agencies, and the UN to advocate for the rights of asylum seekers, refugees, and Dominicans of Haitian descent at risk of statelessness. As a humanitarian programme manager, she oversaw the mobile biometric registration of over 25,000 individuals from vulnerable communities in order to lead an evidence-based human rights advocacy strategy. Sheila is passionate about centering historically marginalized voices in decision making processes. Her experience in community consultations and on-the-ground advocacy building work fuel her belief that people have to be at the center of any solution-building process looking to affect their modus vivendi.
Sheila holds a LL.B from Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in Santo Domingo and a Masters of Public Policy from Northeastern University. She is a Fulbright Foreign Student Program alumna. Sheila enjoys exploring the built and natural environments which spike her curiosity about the different ways of living and interacting with the world around us.

Karla Rocio Heredia

Senior Consultant (she/her)

Karla Rocio Heredia is a senior consultant at Rivera Consulting, where she brings a deep commitment to creating strategies for collective care, deep democracy, and sustainability. With a background in global program management, research, and operations, she specializes in designing and implementing strategies that enhance organizational effectiveness and workforce justice.

Before joining Rivera Consulting, Karla was a Senior Manager of Program Management at Amazon’s artificial general intelligence division, where she led global initiatives across 800+ products, overseeing data quality operations impacting more than 5,000 employees. Her expertise in change management, technical project management, and research-driven decision-making has shaped industry-leading solutions in quality and operational excellence. She has also held key roles in corporate management at Olympus Corporation, Smith & Nephew, and Cambridge Biomedical, where she drove continuous improvement and ethical standards in technical and regulatory environments.
Karla holds a B.S. in Mass Communications from Boston University and is a Six Sigma/LEAN Green Belt certified professional. She has been recognized for her leadership in communication, inclusion, and management excellence, including being named a top quartile manager at Amazon.