Beyazmin Jiménez helps Northeastern’s Planning, Real Estate and Facilities prioritize people and community
Beyazmin Jiménez, director of belonging and engagement for the Planning, Real Estate and Facilities, wins 2025 Staff Excellence Award.
When Beyazmin Jiménez first stepped into her role as Northeastern University’s director of belonging and engagement for the Planning, Real Estate and Facilities division three years ago, she was on a mission.
Jiménez was determined to connect with every one of her 380 co-workers. She implemented an employee engagement survey and launched a mentoring program that boosted internal promotions.
The mission of the program, she says, is to foster connection, well-being and a sense of value in the workplace.
“It is a beautiful program that essentially helps people find their own place within the organization,” Jiménez says. “People come up to me and tell me how much it has made a difference in helping them really understand their own value within the company and even just making friends within the organization.”
The PREF team nominated Jiménez for a 2025 Staff Excellence Award, and she won in the “Driver of community and belonging” category.
“That’s a testament of their trust and their commitment to see this work continue,” she says. “We are at an inflection point, so when I received the award, that was the extra push that I needed to know that I was still going in the right direction.”
According to the award citation, Jiménez “excels in fostering belonging through staff retreats, mentorship programs, facilitating difficult conversations, and maintaining an open-door policy, earning high praise for her contributions to embedding a positive culture in PREF, consistently building community, analyzing impacts and creating opportunities for staff to engage in belonging initiatives.”
In practice, her job is akin to an in-house adviser to team leaders and project managers, Jiménez says, helping them support their projects and finding ways to be more people- and community-centered.
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Another project in which Jiménez played a big part was a two-year effort led by the PREF sustainability team to develop Northeastern’s Climate Justice Action Plan. The work on the plan included organizing community meetings, cultivating community partnerships and hosting planning sessions.
“We worked to find those partners and really make connections with them to help them basically teach us what we needed to do at Northeastern to really create a climate-focused agenda that became the emphasis of the plan,” says Jiménez, who has been in the role for three years.
Through that work, she says, her colleagues leaned on her in making connections and came to trust her to facilitate conversations and workshops.
“I feel really blessed that I was able to land here at a time when the university was also really thinking about its impact globally,” Jiménez says. “It really has been a wonderful three years, and the team that I work with specifically has just been extremely supportive.”
Jiménez grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where early involvement in local politics exposed her to housing instability. That inspired her to earn a master’s degree in urban planning.
She went on to co-found Abundant Housing Massachusetts, a statewide advocacy agency, and the Planners of Color Network, which connects more than 1,000 urban planners across the state.
At the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, Jiménez advanced economic access and opportunity by connecting corporate procurement professionals with local businesses owned by minorities, women and veterans. She also helped launch Small Business Strong, a statewide technical assistance program that supports and revitalizes small businesses through timely pro bono resources.