Eugenio “Owen” K. Smith

As Capacity Building Co-Director at MVP, Eugenio leads a team dedicated to helping groups achieve their goals sustainably. The Capacity Building Team ensures groups have access and connection to the tech tools, leadership development opportunities, skills-building organizational coaching, and training they need from trusted providers and provides the funding to best use those resources.

As a former field director, program director, founder/director, and nonprofit generalist turned coach at organizations just like the ones MVP serves, they know firsthand what it feels like to need access to tools and resources to meet goals being set out by funders without a clear pathway to succeeding. We sought to flip that on its head in our program, centering each group’s needs, values, and power first. This allows MVP to fill an important gap in the movement, help the groups gain significant wins, and have fun while doing it.

Eugenio has two decades of community legislative and electoral campaign organizing experience in communities and states across the country. They have worked for Equality Maryland, Equality Utah, and Western States Center, running programs and Field campaign efforts. They founded and served as a director or co-director at organizations like Team Trans, The Charm City Boys, and Transforming Strategic Direction.

They were born into an eclectic family of strong women and to a union-organizing mother who took them in a stroller to pickets with a small picket sign. From a young age, Eugenio saw the difference that could be made when folks who needed similar changes banded together and grew that into a fulfilling career of helping others and the world.

Now living in Portland, OR, Eugenio can be found whale watching on the Oregon Coast or walking through old-growth conifer forests with their dog, Dashel.