Mary D. Padilla has more than 25 years of experience in communications and marketing, social media, public relations, television production, media relations, account management, public affairs, and event creation and production.

She is founder of Thought Campo, LLC, her freelance marketing communications business specializing in Hispanic outreach.

Padilla is a full-time evaluation team member at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, where she develops and implements a consistent, Foundation-wide evaluation framework and infrastructure that aligns with the Foundation's impact and its racial, equity, diversity, and inclusion goals. Padilla creates narratives to communicate results about findings, learnings, challenges, and failures with internal audiences. She builds relationships with grantees to offer Foundation support and to develop grant impact stories.

Padilla was with the Foundation's public affairs team in August of 2020 before joining the evaluation team in May of 2021. Formerly, she was the Plant Communications Manager at General Motors Fairfax Assembly & Stamping in Kansas City, Kansas. Padilla supported key plant business objectives through strategic communications, internal and external product education, and community relations. She built alliances with all plant stakeholders and local union leadership and partnered with human resources to improve the organization's business culture.

She was Manager, Client Experience at Weber Shandwick Detroit, working on-site in Kansas City for client General Motors. Before that, she was Director of Corporate Affairs at Compass Minerals in Overland Park, Kansas, where she was responsible for developing and executing policies, programs, and services supporting the company's overall operation, community, and growth strategy.

Formerly, she was Communications Director at Bromley Communications, a Publicis Groupe company, in San Antonio, Texas. She was responsible for developing and implementing the advertising agency's overall strategic public relations programs, including overseeing departmental planning, revenue growth, profitability, quality of work, client relations, and strategic development. She was a Director on the account management team, also.

She held leadership positions at Univision Television Network in New York City and Miami and was a telecom executive in Kansas City.