Why Work With Me

I partner with organizational leaders in four areas: strategy and planning, governance and leadership, facilitation and alignment, and organizational strengthening. But what you're really hiring me for is what happens around the work: how I show up, who I am in the room, and what I bring to the partnership.

When you bring in a strategy partner, you're not just hiring expertise. You're trusting someone to sit alongside you at a critical moment, whether it’s a leadership transition, a new direction, or a coalition trying to move something big. I take your trust in me seriously.

I lead every engagement personally. When a project calls for it, I bring in trusted collaborators from my vetted network of consultants — each chosen for the specific strengths your work needs. You always know who you're working with, and the through-line is consistent: my values, my standards, and my care for your success.

Here's what I bring to the partnership, and why leaders across San Antonio, Texas, and beyond choose to work with me.

Image of Maria Fernandez wearing a cobalt blue blouse and decorative Mexican, long brown hair smiling, with a pond behind her.

In San Antonio, I'm already in the room with you.

I've called San Antonio home for 14 years, and in that time I've worked inside many of the organizations, foundations, and institutions shaping this city. That means I don't need to be onboarded to the ecosystem. I already know who's at the table, what's been tried, and where the real tensions live. You get a strategic partner who can hit the ground running and a consulting firm that's certified locally as an MBE, WBE, HABE, SBE, and ESBE — which matters for many public and institutional partners with whom I work.

Across Texas, I bridge worlds that don't always speak the same language.

I can sit with a national funder in the morning and lead a fully bilingual community engagement session in Crystal City or Laredo that afternoon, bringing the same strategic rigor to both. That kind of range is unusual, and it's what allows me to support organizations whose work spans foundation boardrooms and the communities they serve. English and Spanish, urban and rural, executive and grassroots — I'm fluent in moving across them.

Nationally, I bring the rigor of top-tier institutions with a grounded, community-centered approach.

I've spent over 28 years in this work, including more than a decade at Stanford's John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities, leadership roles at Leadership for Educational Equity training hundreds of educators annually across the U.S., and directing a seven-figure capacity building portfolio at the H.E. Butt Foundation. I apply my academic experience through my degrees from Stanford and Harvard, as well as certifications from BoardSource and Cornell. As an Affiliate Consultant with the national social impact firm, Community Wealth Partners, I’ve supported various projects in Oregon, Florida, Minnesota, Indiana, Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas. I’ve worked with national organizations based in the San Francisco Bay Area in California as well as Washington, D.C. Aside from the credentials, though, what clients share that they appreciate about my work is that I show up thoughtful, well-prepared, and genuinely responsive — not with a pre-built framework to impose, but with a process designed to work for them.

Internationally, I bring a cross-cultural lens shaped by lived experience.

My work and my life have always been cross-cultural. I traveled between the U.S. and Mexico throughout my childhood and studied in Mexico City while in college. I'm bilingual and biliterate in English and Spanish, and I've supported leaders and organizations working across borders. I understand that effective strategy can bridge cultures to work beautifully together and that real partnership requires respecting context, language, and the way decisions actually get made in different places. For organizations doing international or transnational work, that fluency shows up in how I design engagements and how I hold space in a room for leaders to do their best work.

The bottom line.

Most consultants offer one of these things — local relationships, statewide reach, national credentials, or cross-cultural fluency. I bring all four to every engagement. That's what allows me to design strategy that's not just well-crafted, but actually embraced and led by the people responsible to carry it forward.

If that sounds like the kind of partner you're looking for, I'd love to talk.

"Working with María was one of the most grounding and clarifying professional experiences I have had as a nonprofit leader. She brought strategic depth, cultural sensitivity, and a rare ability to meet leaders exactly where they are, while pushing them toward where they need to be. María does not just coach leaders, she helps them remember why they started and shows them how to go further than they imagined.”

Tanuke Smith, Executive Director

Texas Federation of the People Foundation