Mary Dupont is the Executive Director for La Plaza Delaware in Sussex County Delaware. La Plaza is a partnership with non-profit and faith-based organizations designed to build business capacity and opportunity for Latino businesses in southern Delaware. It also serves GenZ and Millennial Latinos with formal training in leadership development. Mary embraces partnerships and the use of best practices to address systemic economic injustice and inequality in the US. This project is the culmination of a 40-year career in non-profit and government as a social entrepreneur designing, replicating and implementing high impact programs designed to increase economic equity and opportunity.  

Prior to her work with La Plaza, she joined Governor Jack Markell in 2009 at the state of Delaware in a newly created position as the Director of Financial Empowerment. Headquartered at the Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS), she forged a partnership between DHSS and United Way of Delaware to develop and launch $tand By Me®, an innovative financial empowerment strategy, focused on increasing economic security for all Delawareans. Since it started, in 2011, $tand By Me® served over 100,000 Delawareans through personal financial coaching, financial planning for post-secondary, free web-based tax preparation, interactive financial workshops, and access to financial services.  $tand By Me® is a statewide community partnership which engages key stakeholders from all sectors including business, education, non-profit, and government.    

Leading up to her tenure at the State of Delaware, she was the co-founder and Executive Director of the Nehemiah Gateway CDC, a faith-based community development corporation in Wilmington Delaware. At Nehemiah, she started a statewide EITC Campaign which, in seven years, provided free tax preparation for over 54,000 low-income taxpayers, opened 1400 savings accounts and CDs, and brought back $79 million in refunds. This initiative became the inspiration for the $tand By Me® financial empowerment program. She also spearheaded the organization of the Delaware Family Childcare Alliance, a statewide network of family childcare providers which grew to include 500 home-based providers serving low-income families.

Previously, she started the Director of the Women’s Center for Economic Options at the YWCA where she launched the Working Capital Delaware program, a micro-loan program which served almost 1,000 micro-businesses over six years, and won a Presidential Award in Microenterprise Development in 1997 from President Bill Clinton. Before coming to Delaware, she ran a microenterprise program and worked as a community organizer for a faith-based network of community organizations in Philadelphia.  

She has also consulted nationally and internationally with the Corporation for Enterprise Development, the Grameen Foundation, and others on program design, evaluation, and industry development in asset building and microenterprise development.  She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a Masters in Social Administration from Temple University.