Catholic Charities of San Antonio started the year under new leadership. Ada Saenz was named president and chief executive officer in January and assumed the position on Feb. 2.
Saenz is a longtime nonprofit leader and native of San Antonio’s West Side, who most recently served as CEO of the Boys and Girls Club of San Antonio, a role she took on after working for the nonprofit as its chief operating officer.
Prior to joining the Boys and Girls Club, Saenz worked at The Children’s Shelter as director of contracts and compliance and at Girls Inc. of San Antonio as program director.
Breaking into the nonprofit sector came naturally for Saenz, but as a Latina raised on the West Side of San Antonio, seeing herself as a leader didn’t come easy.
Throughout her career Saenz said she has learned to say “yes” to opportunities and ignore fears. She’s also followed her mother Marisa Navarijo’s advice when even an ounce of self doubt creeps in.
“When I had the crazy idea of applying for my first CEO role at the Boys and Girls Club I told my mom, ‘I’m thinking of applying for the position.’ and she said, ‘You should, baby.’ And I did,” Saenz recalled during a recent interview. “Now here I am, the Catholic Charities new president and CEO.”
Saenz was raised Catholic, and even attended Incarnate Word High School and later the University of Incarnate Word where she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She also earned a master’s degree in community mental health counseling from the University of Texas at San Antonio.
In her role at Catholic Charities, Saenz says she will help steward the organization’s mission of providing “for the needs of our community through selfless service under the sign of love.”
She oversees the everyday operations of the Guadalupe Community Center, Seton Home, St. PJ’s Children’s Home, and San Antonio Birth Doulas. Through these centers, staff and volunteers help provide services to the community, including housing and food services, afterschool programs, legal services, counseling and more.
In 2023 the organization reported serving more than 298,000 individuals, regardless of their religious affiliation.
Saenz is taking over the reins of an organization that over the last year saw its workforce cut in half as federal funds expired and contracts were reallocated, resulting in a loss of more than $50 million for Catholic Charities.
A few weeks into her role and now installed in her office at the organization’s headquarters in the Monte Vista neighborhood, Saenz reminisced on her passion for nonprofit work and serving her community, the role of Catholic Charities across San Antonio and beyond, as well as the challenges that she is prepared to tackle.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you tell us a little bit about your background in the nonprofit sector and what led you to Catholic Charities?
It started when I was in undergrad at the University of Incarnate Word. I started working as a mentor and a tutor for a federally funded program called Trio Student Success, which was a program for first generation college students, students who received Pell grants. I also worked in disability services at the university level. And I caught the bug, right away. I loved working with that population. And from there it was very organic.
You build a lot of relationships in the nonprofit sector in San Antonio. From there I moved to Girls Inc., which is all about empowering young girls to be strong, smart, and bold. Then I moved to the Children’s Shelter and I worked in the foster care system and emergency shelter placements um on the compliance and contract side.
Then again through an organic relationships with the Boys and Girls Club, because they were one of our sub grantees, that’s how I got connected to that organization. I was there for 11 years in operations and in programming for the first seven years, then the last four years as CEO.
So, I’ve been in the sector, you know, 25-plus years and I’ve loved every minute of it.
What do you think made you “catch the bug” about working in nonprofits?
You fall in love with the people that you serve.
First generation college students are going outside of their comfort zone to have a better life for themselves and for their future family. And there’s a lot of unknowns in going out of their comfort zone for the first time.
Their parents didn’t know anything about FAFSA or the application process, or how to be successful in college, or how to go to your counselor for help. All of those things that people who are not first generation take for granted. These are students who are maneuvering through that unknown territory for the very first time. Their bravery spoke to my heart and their desire to to have a better life for themselves spoke to my heart as well.
Tell us more about your new role as president and CEO of Catholic Charities. How would you explain your new position?
There’s a lot of moving pieces with this role. It’s not only the clients that we serve and the complexities associated with the varying needs of our community. But it’s also the staff and making sure that they are set up for success in terms of meeting those needs. Then also working with your board of directors, making sure you have truly engaged boards who are board members who are in it for their mission and are willing to put forth the effort for the mission, so they have it in their heart.
And then working with donors and working with other external stakeholders to make sure that we have the resources to meet the needs of the people that we’re serving. So, there’s lots of complexities, lots of different layers. It’s a lot of listening and it’s a lot of helping people understand the mission and always bringing it back to the why.
What are some of the experiences from your previous roles that you can use to cultivate those relationships here as CEO?
So the nonprofit sector in San Antonio is very small — big in terms of impact, but small in terms of resources.
So we have had to rely on each other and we’ve built really great relationships. And that’s not just the people who are working in those nonprofits but it’s all the people who are also supporting those nonprofits — local corporations, local foundations, local people who are willing to really invest their resources into the nonprofit sector.
So, having built those relationships over the course of my career is going to be extremely helpful in this new role.
And even elected officials too. Federal funding, state funding, local government funding, those are all really big factors in the resources that local nonprofits have at their disposal to help people. There’s a lot of changes happening in the funding landscape.
Maneuvering that together and making sure that local nonprofits are sticking together.
Would you say that this funding landscape has gotten harder to navigate?
Yes, it absolutely has.
I would be shocked if diversifying funding streams was not a top priority for every single profit. Not just in San Antonio or Texas but probably across the country.
You cannot be reliant on any single source of funding but especially right now you cannot be reliant on any type of government funding because things are changing at a rate that I haven’t seen in my history in my 25 years of working in this sector.You just have to make sure that you have lots of different funding opportunities coming your way and not relying on one in particular.
How hard is it to diversify these funding streams in a changing funding landscape and how do you hope to tackle this and other challenges?
When you think about it, there are a lot of different types of stakeholders that want to help, but when a certain funding stream is reduced, that puts more strain on the rest of them to give more.
And so, local philanthropists, local businesses, local foundations, they’re all feeling the impact of federal funding that has been reduced for a lot of nonprofits. And so they’re trying to step up and fill the gap, but there’s only so much resources that they have available to give every year as well. So it all impacts the whole system.
I have been very pleased to hear about how strong Catholic Charities is in our community, both in terms of the impact with the people that we serve, but also in the trust of our funders and the people who are investing in us.
We’ve built trust with those stakeholders over many, many years and I’ve seen our local government, our elected officials, people who really care about our community, come to Catholic charities to say, “Look, we see this need. We want your help.”
What are some of the most pressing needs in our communities today?
Poverty. All across. And the tricky thing about poverty is that it’s so multi-layered. It’s not just okay, let’s help somebody secure a job. There’s a lot of generational trauma that’s associated with poverty. There might be a lot of mental health needs that this person needs to overcome in order to um you know gain the confidence to secure a permanent job.
For working moms, child care is expensive, if they don’t have the money to put their child in care, how are they supposed to work?
It has to be a system approach to true self-sufficiency, to cut that cycle of generational poverty in our community.
So, what excites you the most about the capabilities of Catholic Charities today?
The people. I’m a people’s person and I’m happy to see that there are a lot of people here who love people. I mean, if you work for Catholic Charities or any nonprofit, you’ve got to have a love for people.
But in San Antonio we have amazing leaders who want to do the right thing for our community, who want to help people get to a better place and who want to develop our entire ecosystem and the economy of San Antonio.
I was born and raised here in San Antonio and a lot of our local leaders are born and raised in San Antonio, too. So there’s a real intrinsic desire to see our city thrive.
