Koya Partners | Diversified Search Group partnered with the Chicago Botanic Garden (“the Garden”) to recruit the Vice President of Community Partnerships. The Garden inspires more than one million people a year who visit the main campus and tens of thousands more who are reached through plant conservation science, education, and community-based programs in urban agriculture and horticulture therapy. The Garden is dedicated to work that helps plants, people, and planet thrive.

Our work resulted in the recruitment of Carmen Vergara to the role.

Vergara comes to the Garden with 20 years of extensive experience as a public health practitioner on the southwest side of Chicago where she was proudly born and raised.

Most recently, Vergara served on the executive team as Chief Operating Officer at Esperanza Health Centers where she developed and grew their nationally recognized quality program while doubling service capacity to 50K patients a year through leading a team of 300 staff members. During the COVID pandemic, she operationalized the opening of four mass vaccination sites and partnered with local community-based organizations to deliver 100K vaccines in the first six months of vaccine availability.

Prior to her time at Esperanza, Vergara worked as a research nurse at the UIC School of Public Health where she managed multiple federally funded community based participatory research grants.

Vergara serves on a number of boards including the City of Chicago’s Board of Health, Firebird Community Arts in Garfield Park, and Open Center for the Arts in Little Village.

She received her Bachelors in Nursing and Masters of Public Health from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is an alumna of the University of Chicago’s Civic Leadership Academy.