Kim Avilez has been appointed as a trustee at the Staten Island Museum, which means she will be instrumental in crafting and managing policies that help one of the city’s major museums interpret the Staten Island community. It’s a role in line with the work she’s been doing for years now.
Avilez comes to the museum from the banking industry. She spent years at the executive level at J.P. Morgan Chase as a vice president, managing $3 to $45 million company portfolios in its commercial bank and small business banking divisions.
After giving birth to her son, Antonio, Avilez trimmed her work schedule to spend more time with him at their home. But then a friend asked her to help plan a party. Another needed help organizing an event. It was becoming clear Avilez needed to formally organize the increasing requests for work, so she founded Glow Event Management Co., which specializes in event planning for weddings, corporate and social galas, and travel destination events.
With Glow Event taking off, Avilez strengthened bonds with people she had come to know in the community.
Born and raised in Far Rockaway, Queens, Avilez moved to Staten Island more than 20 years ago. “As I like to say, I married into the island,” Avilez told the AmNews. When she started dating Tony, the man who would become her husband, he was living in Staten Island and running a local business. His family had moved from Brooklyn to Staten Island when he was 10. Avilez knew Staten Island because of family visits. Ever since she was a child, she’d been coming to see her great grandmother, great aunts, and uncles who lived in the Mariners Harbor neighborhood. She had an affinity with Staten Island even before she made it her home.
After graduating high school, her New York life was altered when she went away to try to attend college in Alabama. Although her grandmother lived there, the pacing and feel was just too unfamiliar, so she returned to New York. “I really wasn’t sure about what I wanted to do next. And at the time, my family was not in a financial position to say, ‘Okay, Kim, we can send you to school.’ I realized I had to work and find a way to do this on my own. My mom suggested that I get a job at the bank.” Her mother told her an entry-level bank job could give her time to earn an income while she figured out her schooling situation.
As a part-time teller at what was then Chemical Bank, she had the flexible hours she needed to pursue her education. “My first job was at 1411 Broadway in the middle of the Garment District in Manhattan. And that literally began my kind of love affair with the industry itself. It was great because the bank paid for a portion of my education, allowed me to begin studies in business, and had an additional curriculum that they had within the firm on various skills.” From a part-time teller, Avilez kept moving forward: she transitioned to full-time, and ended up getting a supervisory and then management position in less than a five-year period.
With 40 bank tellers and other supervisors reporting to her, she delved into understanding leadership development and how to support and develop teams. “I spent the next several years moving into different roles within the branches, getting an opportunity to develop as a manager and as a leader within our branch network.”
Leading teams and meeting with business clients sparked Avilez’s interest in coaching and nurturing talent. When she worked as a Garment District bank teller, she regularly met and spoke with designers and textile workers who were operating small businesses—and she also talked with business owners who had larger companies. “When you talk about banking, it’s not just sitting at a teller window and having conversations. Sometimes I’d have clients and because of the nature of the business that they would run, they would use a term called full deposit. So I could have somebody who’s depositing a significant amount of cash. I could be at a window in a transaction with somebody for 15, 20 minutes. And if you think about this, we’re doing this two, three times a week. You start having conversations with this person and you talk about business: there will be networking events and so I’ll get the invite to come. So, it allowed me to be able to cultivate relationships; they would invite me to things even outside of the bank for networking with some of these clients. So, you get to learn about them: I learned about their business, I would know their family, their kids, wedding invites, the list goes on because you spend so much time over the course of several years, you get to know folks after seeing them, some of them, daily.”
The connections Avilez made during her years of banking did not go away once she stepped away to raise her son. Some of the first phone calls she received in the lead-up to starting Glow Event came from those long-standing networks. Avilez worked with other women to start the Minority Women in Business Association of Staten Island. She’s also a board president for the NYC Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners and vice president of the Staten Island Community Alliance.
Knowing that she still maintained deep civic roots, J.P. Morgan Chase came calling again in April of 2022, asking if she would be interested in serving as their vice president and community manager for Staten Island. “The beauty of what I get to do now is a complete marriage of my professional history and career. … I got the call because part of our racial equity commitment was we were going to now not just have this one [community manager] in Harlem, but to have 1,150 community managers across the country to sit in seats in communities to have more of an intentional impact in communities of color and how we deal and how we speak to generational wealth.”
Now, Avilez works with local Staten Island leaders to sponsor 10 to 15 financial education events a month. She said she looks forward to hearing from more locals who want to talk about financial education. She can be contacted via email at Kim.avilez@chase.com or by phone at 718-806-7656. “I have the privilege and opportunity to be an ambassador on behalf of the firm for my local community here in Staten Island,” Avilez said, “tying in resources connected to financial education and financial literacy, supporting our small business owners, tying them to resources and programming specific to pathways to homeownership, through internal programs that we have here in Chase, and connecting them to local resources from city and state agencies as well to make that a reality.”