Staff: Vanessa Alvarez

Vanessa Alvarez was born in Germany to her military family. She spent a good amount of her early childhood moving and traveling around the country until her dad was stationed in Colorado Springs, CO from which he retired from the Army. Vanessa calls Colorado Springs home and has spent the rest of her childhood there as a Peak Education student who has maintained long-standing relationships with some of her own mentors from Peak Education for 16 and 24 years.

She graduated from the International Baccalaureate program at William J. Palmer H.S and obtained her B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, having more recently worked at the laboratory in Evan’s Army Community Hospital as a lab tech. She has spent most of her adult life in Colorado Springs raising a family and serving her community as a mentor, coach, tutor, and youth leader at her church. In the past, she has homeschooled her own kids for 9 years as well as has worked in the school system helping children with special needs and worked as a preschool teacher for Sunday school.

She is married to her husband of 15 years, Cruz, and has four beautiful girls and one little boy. Vanessa has a desire to travel to see new places, enjoys trying new experiences, and eating new cuisines. She’s very adventurous and loves spending time with her family by hiking, biking, camping, kayaking, fishing, swimming, raising animals, gardening as well as learning new things, studying history, reading, dancing, singing, baking, watching movies and encouraging her kids to experience life in new ways as often as they can!

Vanessa loves working with children and adolescents - helping them see the potential within themselves to do great things, introducing them to new opportunities to help them discover their spark and who they are, what they love, and what they’re good at as well as helping them dream and build a plan to reach their dreams.

She is ecstatic to have joined the team at Friends of the Children as a mentor and looks forwards to pouring into the lives of the youth just as her mentors have poured into hers!