Foundation for Puerto Rico: marketing as mission infrastructure.
Across entrepreneurship, community resilience, disaster response and accessibility programs, marketing stopped being the team that communicated finished work and became part of how that work reached the people it was for.
- Organization
- Foundation for Puerto Rico (FPR) — economic development, entrepreneurship, community resilience, recovery, tourism and research.
- My Role
- Marketing & Production Manager throughout the tenure; responsibilities grew over time to include partnerships-facing work, mentorship, and serving as a spokesperson at some events.
- Tenure
- August 2020 – February 2024.
- Related deep-dives
- Destino 191 placemaking case study · From Surviving to Thriving research case study
Translating complexity into access.
I joined during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Puerto Rico's businesses and communities were navigating another period of significant economic uncertainty.
FPR was developing and delivering initiatives involving entrepreneurs, rural communities, government agencies, federal recovery programs, nonprofit partners, subject-matter experts, businesses and residents across Puerto Rico — each with different audiences, requirements, technical information, accessibility considerations and measures of impact. The question became: how can marketing help transform complex programs, institutional knowledge and recovery resources into experiences that communities can understand, access and use? That question fundamentally changed my understanding of marketing.
From communications to production.
I held the title Marketing & Production Manager throughout the tenure. My previous experience across marketing, entrepreneurship, website development, design, digital strategy and multimedia production let me contribute beyond traditional communications.
As the organization's needs evolved, so did my responsibilities — expanding into web development and optimization, multimedia production, livestreaming, educational content, program communications, creative direction, accessibility, community storytelling, field production and team development. Some of that work was partnerships-facing in practice, and I also took on mentorship and spokesperson roles at select events, without those being separate job titles. I worked across multidisciplinary teams including program directors, researchers, funding specialists, communications professionals, designers, government stakeholders, accessibility specialists, external production companies, entrepreneurship organizations, community leaders and volunteers. Rather than only communicating programs after they were built, marketing increasingly became part of how those programs were translated into public-facing experiences.
Marketing should create access, not just awareness.
For a mission-driven organization, conversion doesn't always mean a sale. Depending on the initiative, success could mean helping an entrepreneur understand a business concept, helping a community navigate resilience resources, or helping residents understand an opportunity available to them: Program Knowledge → Accessible Content → Digital Experience → Community Engagement → Participation → Impact.
Translate complexity
Programmatic, economic-development, resilience and technical information needed to become understandable without losing its substance.
Design for accessibility
Language, captions, sign-language accessibility, digital usability, and eventually physical accessibility became part of inclusive communications.
Build reusable knowledge
Workshops and programs created more long-term value once their knowledge became videos, websites, case studies, toolkits and livestreams.
Tell stories from proximity
Community storytelling got stronger when the team spent time in the communities themselves — listening, documenting, participating.
Where the work actually happened.
Seven threads of work, spanning entrepreneurship support to disaster response.
Entrepreneurship & small-business development
Across PULSO, [re]ACTIVA, Emprende 360, Academia de Líderes and other entrepreneurship efforts, I supported the intersection of marketing, education, production and digital communications — program pages, educational content, recording sessions, livestreams, visual communications and digital resources designed to extend knowledge beyond individual workshops. For PULSO specifically, I contributed around Business Assessment, Business 101, Business Plan Innovation, and Marketing & Digital Presence. The objective: don't simply promote the entrepreneurship program — help make the program more useful to the entrepreneur.
PULSO itself — the SBA's Community Navigator Pilot Program — ran on a "Hub & Spoke" model with FPR as the central hub and five specialist partners handling one stage each: Colmena66 (business evaluation & referrals), Centro para Emprendedores (Business 101), INprende (Business Plan Innovation), Brands of Americas (marketing & digital presence), and Latino Economic Development Center (financial education & capital management). FPR reports PULSO reached 1,300+ entrepreneurs through open workshops, with 46 companies ultimately securing financing. [re]ACTIVA was a separate technical-assistance program specifically for businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic — pairing each business with experts in business planning, marketing and finance to address immediate challenges, optimize operations and drive growth.
Whole Community Resilience Planning Program
WCRP became one of the clearest examples of marketing functioning as mission infrastructure. Working alongside program leadership, specialists, designers, government stakeholders and accessibility professionals on an initiative involving CDBG-DR recovery funding and the Puerto Rico Department of Housing, our work translated complex information into web content, visual communications, maps, educational video, animation, case studies and program information — with accessibility built in through bilingual Spanish/English communications, captioning and sign-language support, not bolted on at the end.
The program organizes community resilience planning around six focus areas: education, health, economic development, housing, infrastructure and environment. It also produced two public tools — the Interactive Social Capital Maps and the Interactive Vulnerability and Risk Maps — making FPR's underlying data on community assets, conditions and risk accessible to residents and planners directly, not just program staff. Eligible participants were nonprofit organizations and municipalities (or communities partnering with one).
Destination recovery & rural development
Work also intersected with the Bottom Up Destination Recovery Initiative, Destino 191, and rural-development and destination-reopening efforts. Destino 191, around communities connected to the southern side of El Yunque including the Cubuy area in Naguabo, combined placemaking, rural development, branding, training, documentation and community participation — see the full Destino 191 case study for that program in depth.
Disaster response & community storytelling
During Hurricane Fiona relief efforts, my responsibilities included capturing visual content and communicating what FPR and its collaborators were accomplishing — but the work didn't stay behind the camera. I also joined volunteers distributing water, nonperishable food and other immediate-need supplies. The videos weren't the impact; they documented the impact.
Fiona's aftermath left nearly 778,000 families without running water across the island. FPR's response drew directly on lessons from Hurricane María: opening its own facilities to other nonprofits, reactivating its Fiscal Sponsorship Program so NGOs without 501(c)(3) status could still receive donations, and reactivating the Small Business Support Program to get cash grants and technical assistance to affected businesses.
Accessibility beyond digital: Mar Sin Barreras
Mar Sin Barreras extended accessibility principles into the physical environment — improving beach access for people with physical and motor disabilities, including wheelchair access infrastructure and amphibious chairs to help people move from land into the water, in collaboration with government entities, communities, local businesses and volunteers.
Una Cita en el Colab & content development
As FPR's creative capabilities expanded, I helped strengthen the internal content operation, including recommending talent for graphic design and copywriting roles. Una Cita en el Colab evolved from live digital programming into a more controlled prerecorded format, improving production quality, storytelling, editing, guest experience and content longevity each episode. Episodes covered ground like Mobility as a Service (MaaS) as a transportation solution for the Eastern Region, and the Visitor Economy Impact Model developed for that same region — conversations with leaders across the public, private and community sectors on the visitor economy in Puerto Rico. The series continued beyond my tenure and is now FPR's official podcast.
Research & knowledge library
FPR's research unit publishes under a "knowledge to action" mantra, and the volume published during this tenure spans four categories: roughly 10 destination plans (municipality-level placemaking plans covering areas like Ceiba & Naguabo, Fajardo & Luquillo, Arecibo & Camuy, and the Destino 191 rural placemaking plan itself), 14+ research & analysis papers (including Puerto Rico's Visitor Economy Performance Model, The State of Housing in Puerto Rico, the Global Innovation Index collaboration, and the From Surviving to Thriving entrepreneurship study), 5 programmatic case studies (including the Small Business Cash Grant Program and the Bottom Up Destination Recovery Initiative), and policy briefs on topics like post-lockdown business realities. See From Surviving to Thriving for the entrepreneurship-ecosystem research case study in depth.
Let’s Imagine Our Future Together
One of the culminating creative initiatives of my tenure — Imaginemos un Futuro Juntos — brought together the Communications Manager, a graphic designer, a copywriter and external production resources. By this point I could draw on years of accumulated institutional knowledge of FPR's programs, people and communities to help shape how the organization told its larger story, not just how individual programs were communicated.
Foundation for Puerto Rico, by the numbers.
These are FPR's own organizational and program outcomes — pulled from their published reporting and research page — not metrics attributable to marketing alone. My contribution was helping build the communications, production, digital, educational and storytelling infrastructure through which portions of that work reached their audiences.
Leadership Academy — self-reported outcomes
214 participants across 52 municipalities completed the program; these are FPR's published percentages of participants reporting each outcome.
Hurricane María Relief Fund — grants approved by category
$4,218,096 was donated by 1,000+ donors; $3,224,979 of that was approved in grants, broken down here by category.
[re]ACTIVA created structured technical assistance for Puerto Rico businesses affected by COVID-19. WCRP built an extensive public-facing resilience information environment around community-driven planning. Hurricane Fiona recovery efforts translated fundraising into direct support for affected businesses and communities. Una Cita en el Colab grew into an ongoing FPR content platform. As the lesson goes: marketing doesn’t need to own the impact to help make the impact possible.
A different definition of conversion.
In a commercial environment, the journey might be Awareness → Lead → Customer → Revenue. At FPR, conversion could mean something else entirely.
Information → Understanding → Participation → Opportunity → Impact.
A website could connect a community with resources. A video could make technical knowledge understandable. A workshop could strengthen an entrepreneur. A toolkit could let knowledge continue beyond a program. Accessible communications could let someone participate who otherwise might have been excluded. And during disaster response, the most valuable contribution might have had nothing to do with marketing at all — it might simply mean joining the volunteers and helping. Marketing creates its greatest value in mission-driven organizations when it stops simply communicating impact and becomes part of the infrastructure through which people access it.