Johanna Moya Fábregas

What we talked about

Generational impact, in one phrase

Asked to explain an organization most people have driven past without knowing, she does it in a sentence. El Buen Samaritano has been in Austin for close to forty years, providing a combination of essential needs support and education support aimed at generational transformation. Breaking ties of poverty, taking families to the next level of opportunity, changing generations. What they do in one word, she says, is generational impact.

Her own job is new. She is the first chief of strategy, innovation and impact, working alongside the chief executive to deliver a strategic plan the organization has just launched. She admits the title is a mouthful and then makes it concrete: the central piece of the plan is the education strategy.

Academic rigor from first grade to twelfth

The education work spans first through twelfth grade and is built on academic rigor, with two destinations in mind rather than one. Higher education for the students who want it, and workforce pathways for the students who want those. She is deliberate about not privileging either.

The clearest example is the community health worker certification, a program El Buen has run for years and is now growing, because it functions as an entry point into health care careers. For the first time it is being delivered to a cohort of youth over the summer, and she is visibly excited about it. The same program is being run for a cohort of mothers of small children through a partner organization, which means the same credential is opening the same door for two generations of the same families at once.

A food pantry is a front door

This is the most useful thing in the interview for anyone who works in social services, and she walks it through as a sequence rather than a list of programs.

A family arrives at the food pantry and says they need support. The answer is come any day we are open, we are here for you. Then comes the question that does the actual work: do you have kids, and do they need academic support. If yes, the children enroll in after-school programming, which is tied to a partnership with the school district that lets El Buen track those students' grades directly rather than guessing at outcomes. Social and emotional support runs alongside the academics.

That child reaches high school and starts asking about careers, which is where the university partnership she is currently building comes in. Summer camps, which she notes can cost five hundred dollars a week or more in Austin and fill up fast, are offered at low cost or with scholarships so the same kids are not shut out of the summer.

Meanwhile the adult in the household enrolls in English classes. On graduating those, there is a cohort program that asks the next question: now what do you want to do. If the answer is start a business, there is a small business incubator that teaches classes on site, and banking partners on the other end of it.

Her phrase for this is a one-stop shop, and she earns it. At the end of the sequence the family has a child enrolled in higher education, an adult earning more, and something less visible but arguably more durable: they know how to navigate systems of support the next time an emergency arrives.

How she measures success

She frames the whole model around the social determinants of health, so success is holistic by design: economic stability, good health, access to education, and safety. Those four are what she would measure a family against.

The illustration she reaches for is not a statistic. A woman came in recently to volunteer and became emotional, because when she first moved to Austin she had come to that same food pantry for help, and she now runs her own business and is in a position to support other people. That, Johanna says, is a pretty clear picture of success.

The welcome is part of the program

The line the video opens on is worth sitting with, because it is an operational claim disguised as a nicety. If you show up in a space where people welcome you with a smile, where your kids are treated well, where they are happy to see you, it does not just feel better. It encourages you to take the next step and use the other opportunities that come down the line.

In other words the warmth at the front desk is what converts a food pantry visit into an after-school enrollment, and an English class into a business plan. It is the mechanism, not the decor.

A collective built out of the pandemic

She names a long list of partners without hesitating: the city, the county, the regional food bank as the pantry's main supplier, and then a group of education-focused nonprofits El Buen convened into a formal collective, whose charter was signed in December after roughly two years of work.

What she says makes it work is the part that cannot be manufactured. These organizations had already been working together informally through the pandemic, when it did not matter what your organization officially did. Whatever the community needed, you paused everything and figured out together how to address food security, internet access, connectivity, health. The trust relationships were built under those conditions, and the partnerships now flourish because that trust already exists. Without them, she says, they could not do half the work.

Santiago, Miami, Madison

Her own story is the argument the organization is making, and she tells it plainly. She lived in Santiago before the family moved to the United States. Her father was Chilean, her mother is Cuban, and her father, who died eleven years ago, was the single biggest influence on the decisions she has made about education.

The family landed in Miami first, and quickly worked out the American arrangement: if you were not affluent and could not live in a neighborhood with better schools, the ticket into success through education meant private school or a more expensive zip code. That was not their situation. They knew people in Madison, Wisconsin, who told them the public schools were among the best in the country and there was a good university there and there were jobs. Nobody speaks Spanish, they were told, but you will have to figure it out.

They moved anyway. She is unambiguous that they did it for her.

She was first generation. Her father had some college and did not finish; her mother went as far as the sixth grade in Cuba. They understood a degree would open doors, and her father added the instruction that shaped everything after it: do not just do something to earn money, do something you love, and that will open other doors.

One percent of the high school

In her Madison high school, roughly one percent of students were Latino, which she offers as a contrast to the Texas she works in now. Her response then was the same as her job now: she built the thing that did not exist, starting clubs for Latino students and joining organizations.

That led to the state's research university, research at a young age, study abroad, and eventually a doctorate in Latin American history. Along the way she started reflecting on the effect those experiences were having on her, and decided she wanted to have that effect on other people. That is the whole reason she went into education and then made the leap into the nonprofit world, always to organizations with education at the center of the mission.

Austin, incidentally, was on her radar long before she moved here. UT held a major archive she drew on for her research, and growing up she had constantly heard Austin described as Madison with a better climate.

Why she stayed

She arrived about thirteen years ago from Puerto Rico, where she had lived for five years, leaving because it was not safe and she was a new mother looking for somewhere better for her child.

What made her stay was not the weather. It was how invested people here are in bettering their community, and not only the people paid to do it. Volunteers, people in unrelated fields, people working on the environment or education or economic mobility. She has lived in multiple cities in multiple countries, and every place has its problems, but she kept meeting people she could see eye to eye with. That is when she decided she belonged here.

The whiteboard

The best story on the tape comes from a job she took because she needed one immediately. Newly divorced and newly arrived in Austin, she took a high school position teaching Spanish literature, having sworn she would only ever teach college students, on the grounds that working with teenagers would mean dealing with someone like her own teenage self. She calls it the best thing that happened to her.

Most of her students were Latino and first generation, the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves, and many of them had a rational argument against college. They had family in construction or plumbing. They could earn real money at seventeen, and it paid well, and their families needed it. They were not being lazy, they were being loyal.

So she argued back with arithmetic. What happens if you are in construction and you have an accident. What happens when you have children and need insurance. And then, with her own toddler at home as the reference, she would pull up a board and write the numbers down. This is what diapers cost. This is what it costs when a kid gets sick. This is what daycare costs.

Her point was never that a trade is beneath anyone. It was that a salary only goes so far, that your family needs you more as it ages, and that an education is what gives you the ability to move between fields and to build something of your own.

The sandwich generation

She makes the same case from her own life, in both directions at once. Education gave her opportunities her daughter now has earlier than she did. It also gave her the economic stability to care for her mother, who is in her eighties.

Her conclusion is the sharpest line in the interview and it reframes the entire argument about why school matters. You need an education, she says, to be able to help those that come after you and those that came before you.

The thing schools do not teach

She and Aidan land in the same place from opposite directions: none of this is in the curriculum. Finances, life choices, what it actually takes to be an adult. Her view is that it is late to start thinking about it once the problem has arrived, and that somebody has to talk to kids about it before then.

Which is, more or less, a description of what El Buen is trying to build.