Equis Senior Fellowship Program

Janis Bowdler is the Senior Economic Fellow. She is a cross-sector leader with a career dedicated to advancing economic opportunity and equity in underserved communities. She has held leadership roles across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including serving as President of the JPMorgan Chase Foundation and as the U.S. Treasury Department’s first-ever Counselor for Racial Equity. In that role, she advised the Secretary on embedding equity into federal recovery efforts and aligning public and private investments to expand access to capital, particularly for communities of color. Janis has spent the last two decades advancing economic equity solutions for communities of color and breaking down the barriers that underpin the disparities in wealth and financial security by race and gender.

Felicia Escobar Carrillo is the Senior Fellow for Immigration. She has spent her career advocating for Latino and immigrant families. Most recently, Felicia was Chief of Staff at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Under Felicia’s leadership, USCIS restored its fiscal health, reduced historic backlogs, improved customer experience, and implemented numerous regulatory and policy reforms designed to make the immigration system more accessible to families, businesses, workers, and aspiring new Americans. From 2009-2017, she served at the White House where she advanced President Obama’s immigration agenda, including its efforts to enact bipartisan immigration reform and implementation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. She has worked in the U.S. Senate on immigration reform and advocated for Texas Latino communities at the state and local levels. Felicia has also advised several philanthropic institutions on their immigration grantmaking strategies.