Arellana Barela Levenson is the founder and CEO of Cultivar Communities and founder and board chair of the Cultivar Communities Foundation, which help families turn access to financial systems into lasting participation in the economy.

She is a strategist, investor, and entrepreneur with more than three decades of leadership across banking, philanthropy, and community development. She served as Executive Vice President and CFO of Southwest Capital Bank and as President and CEO of Prosperity Works, a nonprofit advancing children’s savings account programs in New Mexico, and completed the ABA Stonier Graduate School of Banking at the Wharton School. Her work centers on how identity, culture, and trust shape financial behavior, and her writing on family financial participation has appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

She holds a Master of Public Leadership from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin and an BBA and a MBA from the University of New Mexico, and is a 2026 Presidential Leadership Scholar. She and her husband Greg Levenson, are raising their five children to see themselves as investors and good ancestors, the same belief that drives her work.