Maria is a higher education leader, community engagement strategist, educator, and advocate with thirty+ years of experience designing and leading programs that connect higher education with communities in meaningful, reciprocal, and transformative ways. As a Director of Community-Based Learning (CBL), Maria has spent years building the infrastructure, partnerships, and practices that allow students, faculty, and community organizations to learn from and contribute to one another. Maria redesigned and coordinated Holyoke Bound, a Five College program, for over a decade.
Throughout her career, Maria has worked at the intersection of higher education, social justice, community organizing, community partnership, and transformative leadership development. Her work encompasses program strategy and administration, faculty course support, student leadership, community partnerships, curriculum development, experiential learning, and institutional change. She brings a particular ability to translate institutional priorities into meaningful community-engaged experiences while ensuring that community partners are valued as co-educators and collaborators.
Her practice is also informed by restorative justice, circle practice, dialogue, and relationship centered approaches to leadership. Maria believes that meaningful engagement requires more than placing students in communities; it requires building relationships based on reciprocity, respect, shared power, reflection, and a genuine commitment to community defined priorities.
In service to the college, Maria serves on the Common Read committee, First Generation Network, Projects 4 Peace Fellowship committee, and advisor to Mi Gente LLC.
Outside of MHC, Maria is known as the Holyoke’s Puerto Ricans People’s Historian. She served as a consultant to many city initiatives, including the recent naming of Downtown Holyoke as the Puerto Rican Historical District.
