Gena Wilimitis, Co-Host, Focus on the Future - 

Mrs. Wilimitis has over 20 years of business, marketing and investment experience.  She became passionate about financial education when she joined the New Mexico Securities Division as the Investment Education Coordinator, and since she has been actively making presentations on the risks and rewards of investing.  During this time she has helped develop content for investor education brochures and public presentations, developed, created, designed and produced an ID Theft seminar for New Mexico, and created, developed  and starred in (?) the documentary, “Betrayal of Trust”, for the Division.  Mrs. Wilimitis serves on a national project group that studies and researches cases of ethnic, military, and religious-based affinity fraud and is a board member for the New Mexico Project for Financial Literacy.  She also chairs the New Mexico Coalition for Financial Education and founded the Annual Lt. Governor’s Summit on Financial Education.   Additionally, during her time with the Securities Division she was a national panelist for securities related issues at the Native American Finance Officers Associations Annual Conferences in San Diego and Chicago and spoke on securities issues for the Law Enforcement Outreach program for the North American Securities Administrator’s Association (NASAA) Annual Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada; a program she pioneered in conjunction the Bernalillo County Sherriff’s office in Albuquerque, NM. Mrs. Wilimitis was the 2009 Keynote speaker at the 3rd Annual Mayor’s Conference for Women and a featured speaker at the Smart Women’s Conference at Drake University. Prior to her current work in financial education she worked as a bank examiner for the State of New Mexico’s Financial Institutions Division and was an investment broker for A.G. Edwards and Sons, Inc.  Gena has a BA in Communication from McMurry University in Abilene, TX. To date, Gena considers her greatest accomplishment is her partnership with Skip Cowan and the Focus on the Future program, where she assisted in the creation of Focus’s weekly web show.