Creating Legacies, One Family at a Time

Our founder

She Lived It. Then She Changed It.

Barbara Alvarez, Founder & CEO

Barbara's own journey was not without challenges. She became a teen parent, experienced an unhealthy relationship, and entered adulthood as a single mother. Rather than allowing those circumstances to define her future, they helped shape the woman, leader, and advocate she would become.

Barbara found her calling in social services. Early in her career, working directly with families, she saw firsthand the gaps in the systems designed to help them. Services existed, but they were often fragmented. Families could receive help for one immediate problem while the circumstances contributing to that problem remained unaddressed. Barbara began to envision a different approach, one that looked at the needs of the entire family.

When an unexpected layoff changed the course of her career, Barbara returned to college to complete her business education. In 2015, while still a college student, she turned the vision that had been developing since the beginning of her career into action and founded Family Support Network Inc. (FSN). But founding FSN was only the beginning.

Barbara continued working in social services while volunteering her time to build FSN alongside its board. As her professional career grew, so did her leadership. She advanced into director-level positions, where she learned to write grants, secure funding, develop programs, and put many of the ideas she had envisioned into practice. Those experiences were invaluable, but they also reinforced something Barbara already understood: her vision was bigger than one grant, one program, or one funding cycle.

While continuing her professional career, Barbara and FSN's board worked within the South Bronx to establish a community presence, build relationships, understand and measure community needs, and develop programs in response to what families were actually experiencing. Rather than creating services based solely on assumptions, FSN's approach evolved through years of listening, learning, testing ideas, and responding to the community.

Over time, those experiences helped shape what has become FSN's whole-family model: an approach that recognizes that challenges involving housing, employment, education, parenting, youth development, financial stability, grief, and family well-being are interconnected and cannot always be solved in isolation.

Families did not need another referral. They needed a partner. Barbara's personal experiences continued to deepen that mission. At 35, she experienced the devastating loss of her father. That loss strengthened her understanding of how grief can affect an entire family and helped shape grief and bereavement support as part of FSN's whole-family approach.

Today, more than a decade after FSN was founded, Barbara's vision extends beyond the South Bronx. She believes the gaps she witnessed early in her career exist in urban communities across the country, and that the lessons learned through years of community-based work can become a model for serving families on a much larger scale.

Barbara aspires to pursue a Doctorate of Business Administration (DBA) to research, measure, and strengthen the evidence behind FSN's whole-family approach, transforming years of community experience into an evidence-based, replicable model that can be evaluated, improved, and brought to other communities.

Her vision is to expand Family Support Network from New York into New Jersey and, ultimately, urban communities nationwide.

Barbara has lived the challenges. She has worked inside the systems designed to address them. And for more than a decade, she has worked alongside her community to build something different.

Because every family deserves a partner for success.