Our Team
Ana Lopez Shalla has worked at the intersection of education and industry for the majority of her career, helping to better align workforce systems through the development and deployment of strategic initiatives and new programs. Her passion is creating solutions that allow both individual learners and the wider economy to reach their fullest potential. She holds an Ed.M. in Learning & Teaching from Harvard University and a B.A. in English and Theology from Boston College.
Currently, Ana serves as the Director of Strategic Partnerships and New Market at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She previously was the Director of Workforce Development at the Greater Omaha Chamber and worked for several years at Avenue Scholars, an educational nonprofit focused on empowering high school and college-age students to find success in demand-driven career pathways with local businesses. Ana’s specialty is scaling workforce development initiatives for impact–be it launching them from the ground up or refocusing and reinvigorating pre-existing efforts. She is best known for her leadership on regional workforce development initiatives including Intern Omaha (a city-wide internship program), InternNE (a $20M statewide investment in internship programming), and launching workforce-focused microcredentials and digital badging at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Key to her work is facilitating cross-sector partnerships, and she has firsthand experience engaging K-12 systems, private sector organizations, public workforce systems, community colleges, research universities, nonprofit agencies, state governments, chambers of commerce, and other key stakeholders.
Stan Odenthal has extensive experience in bringing together and skillfully facilitating collaborative projects amongst multiple stakeholders. He has held multiple executive-level positions in state government before transitioning into consulting and nonprofit leadership. Stan holds a J.D. from the University of Nebraska College of Law, an M.A. in Political Science with a focus on Public Policy from the University of Nebraska Lincoln, and a B.A. in History and Political Science from Weber State University.
Stan is currently the Director of Business Relations at Heartland Workforce Solutions, the local workforce development area for the three counties in and around Omaha, Nebraska. He previously held the post of Director of the Office of Employment and Training with the Nebraska Department of Labor overseeing workforce development programs statewide. Before that, he was appointed the Executive Director of the Nebraska Equal Opportunity Commission with oversight of Nebraska’s investigations into discrimination claims in the context of employment, housing, and public accommodations. Stan’s WIOA policy experience is extensive, having started his career with the Nebraska Department of Labor as its Statewide Policy Program Coordinator before taking on the role of Administrator of Workforce Services. In this role was the functional administrator for the Greater Nebraska Local Workforce Development Area and its 88-county area.