San Antonio Impact Leaders

“I think I was the only student at St. Mary’s University with a potato sack full of produce that my uncle gave me,” says Adrian Lopez, CEO of Workforce Solutions Alamo. He’s one of four San Antonio Impact Leaders LISC San Antonio recognized at its awards luncheon. The youngest of seven, Adrian was the first one to finish school and go on to college, he says.

“Building on the health, well-being of underserved communities is really what my job is,” says Donna C. Richardson, SVP and CRA officer at Frost Bank. A young man in “our academy” once won a scholarship but couldn’t take it, because he’d enrolled in the Army and was being deployed the next week. A couple of years later, at H-E-B, he ran after her calling, “Ms. Frost Bank, Ms. Frost Bank.” He’d opened a savings account, and “he took it to heart.”

Levar Martin, EVP and COO at NALCAB, calls his path “that kind of late start, trying to figure life out that led me here.” In his senior year of high school, his family filed for bankruptcy and their house was foreclosed on. “If I can help one other person not have to go through that,” he says, “it’s something that really helps drive my work today.”

“We can’t keep doing things the way we’ve always done them,” says Mary E. Garr, president and CEO of Family Service. This work won’t always show a quick win, she says. “We’re talking about generational change.” She’s grateful for the recognition, but to her “it truly is a team recognition and a team sport.”