Financial advisor Mina Gomez, of Edward Jones in Wenatchee, is a 2025 Uplift Award winner.

Gomez (pictured above holding the plaque) was recognized for her contributions to "promoting civil rights and social justice," as City Administrator Laura Gloria put it at Saturday's ceremony.

The desire to bolster financial literacy - including, and perhaps especially, in immigrant communities and communities of color - is what animates Gomez.

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"In general, I'm a wealth planner and investment advisor," Gomez tells KPQ. "But I pride myself on going very deep. We do everything from the beginning foundations of emergency savings - to the more thorough, in-depth conversations about wealth transition, tax planning and ensuring that the hard work you put in will be transitioned to that next generation in the best way possible." Generational wealth, she says, is ineffably important.

"One of the things I find most gratifying is being able to have a true impact on [clients'] future." Gomez understands better than most the paramountcy of planning ahead. Not only is she the daughter of Mexican immigrants; she lost both her father and elder brother in a car accident.

"My father had met with an insurance agent, and talked about life insurance, but he didn't understand the depths of it," Gomez says. "There was no one to explain it in his language, so he never purchased a policy."

"That's definitely what inspired me - to be able to educate families and invest time into our communities, so that we break some of our barriers."

We have a long way to go, but there's ever-accumulating evidence, Gomez says, that those barriers are dissolving. She is continually reassured by her dealings with second- and third-generation immigrants.

"They're now high-income earners with six-figure incomes," Gomez says, "and a lot of them never had those financial education conversations with their loved ones because that wasn't something that was taught, right? Or maybe their parents didn't have that kind of education."

"But [younger immigrants] are very savvy - in fact, they're some of my best clients in the sense of paying off debts early on or paying off homes in their early 40s. It's pretty exciting."

Click here for more on the Uplift Awards.

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