Maria Alvarez-Stroud

Founder & past Director
Broadband & E-Commerce Education Center, University of Wisconsin Extension;
Consultant to Connected Aging Communities Endeavor

Maria Alvarez Stroud is the founder and past director of University of Wisconsin-Extensions’ Broadband & E-Commerce Education Center. She is currently a consultant to the Connected Aging Communities effort of the Center. 

From 2010-’13 she successfully led the NTIA federally funded endeavors of UWEX, a $45 million effort bringing additional fiber to Wisconsin for community anchor institutions along with a community education and outreach effort to encourage broadband adoption.

She is a seasoned executive with over 25 years of experience in creating new service streams and seeking out new ways of reaching underserved audiences. Maria has done this work in a variety of settings, from the nonprofit sector to public broadcasting and higher education. She is experienced in change management, strategic partnership advancement, and fund development, having created numerous tools recognized nationally.

Throughout the course of her career Maria has successfully started her own business, been a management consultant for both for-profit and nonprofit enterprises, instituted community engagement as a new core service of Wisconsin Public Television, was the founder and CEO of the National Center for Media Engagement, an entity of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and is now assisting UW-Extension with instituting broadband as a core community infrastructure throughout Wisconsin. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and Communications and a Masters in Public Policy and Administration from University of Wisconsin-Madison.