Kriztina Palone joined the Irvine Foundation as a Senior Program Officer in August 2022. She has more than a decade of experience working in local government, including 10 years in the San Francisco Mayor’s Office and seven years with the City of Sacramento. Over the course of her career, she has worked on a large array of local initiatives and political projects focused on addressing racial disparities, social & economic justice priorities, particularly addressing the lack of access to adequate resources for marginalized communities.

Before joining the Foundation, Kriztina served as the City of Sacramento’s first Workforce Development Manager in the Office of Innovation + Economic Development Department. There she led a portfolio of workforce development initiatives and programs focused on addressing the workforce needs of vulnerable communities, creating greater access to career pathways in high-demand and high-growth industries, and supporting the coordination and alignment to the larger workforce development ecosystem in Sacramento.

Specific projects Kriztina oversaw include the co-creation and management of the Sacramento Mayor’s Workforce Coalition, a fifty-member multi-disciplinary body of critical workforce stakeholders, and the Inclusive Economic + Community Development Investment Committee’s Workforce Advisory Subcommittee. Kriztina also led the City of Sacramento’s Federal CARES-$10M Workforce Recovery Program, the Clean + Green Workforce Pathways Working Group, and was the City of Sacramento’s Liaison to the Sacramento Employment and Training Agency Governing Board and their Employer Outreach Committee. Her last notable project with the City of Sacramento was co-creating and designing the City Council-approved workforce development framework and $15M Federal ARPA + General Fund workforce development strategy, called SacBldsSkills2Careers.

Kriztina is a Sacramento native and has a bachelor’s degree in Social Work from San Francisco State University.  She is also an alumni of the 2022 Coro Workforce Leaders Network (WLN) Fellowship for mid-career workforce professionals.