Yesenia Alvarez-Gonzalez is the Chief Program Officer at AVANCE – San Antonio. Having been with AVANCE for 20 years, her experience includes teaching parenting classes, training on program leadership, supervision and management, referral and resource advocacy, and conflict resolution. She began her career as a Parent Educator in AVANCE’s Parent-Child Education Program. Through the years at AVANCE, she has administered and implemented alongside a dynamic team of educators and directors AVANCE’s Parent/Child center- and school-based, Services to Fathers, and Early Head Start and Head Start programs, to include family engagement services.

Yesenia strongly believes in the importance of AVANCE engaging low income families with young children, and that parents are their child’s first and most important teachers. Yesenia’s passion is to serve the community where she was raised – by a single parent on government subsidies, facing hunger and homelessness.

The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Yesenia attended SAISD inner-city schools and was her family’s first high school and college graduate. After studying at San Antonio College, she earned her Masters in Nonprofit Management & Leadership from Our Lady of the Lake University.

Yesenia enjoys spending time with her husband, three children and many friends; taking bicycle rides along the mission trails, zumba workouts, gardening and caring for their family’s pet rabbit.