Hatzune Aguilar serves as Executive Director of Communities for a New California Education Fund. She is the daughter of a Guatemalan Mayan immigrant father and a multiracial mother of Filipino, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, and white heritage, with family roots in Hawaiʻi.

Raised in Santa Cruz, Watsonville, and San Francisco, Hatzune grew up moving between cultures, neighborhoods, and economic realities. Her father came to the United States speaking only Spanish and built a life while navigating the ways language limited his opportunities, eventually dedicating his career to helping unhoused people access housing and mental health services. Her mother relied on public benefits and her own resourcefulness to earn her degree and become a teacher, building stability for their family.

From these experiences, Hatzune learned that stability itself can be fragile, that a single unexpected event can alter a family’s trajectory, and that hard work alone cannot overcome systems designed to keep families like hers from getting ahead. She carries a responsibility to turn what previous generations survived and fought for into greater possibilities for those who come next.

For more than two decades, Hatzune has worked in community organizing, public policy, communications, civic participation, electoral campaigns, nonprofit leadership, and government. She began her career in tenant rights in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and later led voter outreach, polling, communications, and policy efforts focused on Latino and historically underrepresented families. Early in her career, she learned from Dolores Huerta and Fred Ross Jr., mentors who reinforced her belief that people are the experts in their own lives.

Hatzune's work spans the Oakland Mayor’s Office, MOVE the Valley, and statewide stakeholder engagement at the California Department of Health Care Services. From 2018 to 2024, she served as CNC’s Director of Strategic Engagement, working closely with CNC founder Pablo Rodríguez, a colleague and dear friend whose approach to organizing and commitment to building durable local power helped shape her own. Throughout her career, she has focused on connecting people’s lived realities to public decisions, challenging assumptions about rural and underrepresented families, and creating opportunities for people to exercise their own leadership.

Hatzune earned a bachelor’s degree in Political, Legal and Economic Analysis, with an emphasis in International Relations, from Mills College,  and a Master of Public Administration from the University of Southern California. She is queer and lives in Sacramento with her husband, two children, cat, and dog.