He has devoted his skills and expertise in personal finance, management, housing, and economic policy, as well as his passion for social justice and economic opportunity, to provide a better life for the diverse low- and moderate-income population he serves.
For his efforts, Bonilla has been selected by the Bowdoin College Board of Trustees to receive the 2020 Common Good Award.
Born in Puerto Rico, Bonilla moved with his family at age nine to Lawrence, where he grew up learning about both the need and opportunity for revitalization in his community. A sociology and Spanish double major at Bowdoin, he was active in several cultural organizations and began building an academic foundation to acquire practical skills that would later enable him to be an effective community leader and advocate. While still a student at Bowdoin, he worked as a youth employment training counselor; after graduation, he took a job as an assistant grocery store manager and then worked as a financial planner and financial services advisor for MassMutual, before arriving at Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW) in 2004. Bonilla began at LCW as a homeownership counselor, later becoming director of homeownership, then director of the asset building department, and later ascending to his current position as deputy director.
Throughout this time, Bonilla served his community in multiple and significant capacities— volunteering as a member of the Merrimack Valley YMCA board of directors, The Midas Collaborative board of directors, the board of the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations, and the Federal Reserve Bank Community Advisory Council and as a mentor for the Lawrence Boys and Girls Club. He has received certifications from NeighborWorks, the Massachusetts Citizens Housing and Planning Association, Mass Housing, United Way of Mass Bay, the Institute of Nonprofit Management and Leadership, and UnidosUS (formerly the National Council of La Raza), for which he was a national training provider. In 2014, the Lawrence Bar Association honored Bonilla with its Liberty Bell Award, recognizing his work “on the forefront of educating families on how to acquire and maintain homeownership successfully,” as well as his advocacy “against the dangers of predatory lending and mortgage fraud.” In 2019, he was named one of five Neighborhood Fellows of the Tufts University Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning master of public policy program.
Colleagues have called Bonilla “a ferocious and knowledgeable advocate for economic justice and prosperity in our community.”
Established in 1994 on the occasion of the Bowdoin College Bicentennial, the Common Good Award honors those alumni who have demonstrated an extraordinary, profound, and sustained commitment to the common good, in the interest of society, with conspicuous disregard for personal gain in wealth or status.
Common Good Award recipients personify the idea of the common good as set forth by Bowdoin’s first president, Joseph McKeen. In his inaugural address on September 2, 1802, McKeen reminded his audience, “It ought always to be remembered that literary institutions are founded and endowed for the common good and not for the private advantage of those who resort to them for education. It is not that they may be able to pass through life in an easy and reputable manner, but that their mental powers may be cultivated and improved for the benefit of society.”
