Antonio Fonseca: Cultivating a Culture of Learning at ServiceNet

In the late 1970s, when Antonio Fonseca was growing up in the mountains of Puerto Rico, trying to make sense of the world and starting to engage with grassroots politics, his grandfather offered him a piece of advice: If you want to change a system, first learn how it works.

Fonseca’s grandfather was a campesino, an agricultural worker whose labor ranged from pig farms to sugarcane and tobacco fields. His mother was a seamstress. Neither attended school. But for ServiceNet’s director of learning and development, they were his most important teachers.

“They taught me life,” he said.

At school in Cañaboncito, the Caguas barrio where he grew up, Fonseca remembers classrooms without air conditioning and worn textbooks patched together with wire and duct tape. He later became the first in his family to graduate from college, studying education and fine arts at what is now the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico, while also training in the Montessori method.

Montessori appealed to him because it emphasized developing strengths and abilities rather than focusing on deficits. Fonseca sees the same principle at work in effective organizations: Figure out what people can already do well, emphasize those skills, and help them acquire the tools to address areas where they struggle.

“When staff learn, they feel empowered,” he said. “They feel stronger. They feel capable. They feel valued. When you want unity in an organization, education is the key.”

That philosophy now informs his work at ServiceNet, where Fonseca is building a culture of learning into a unified learning and development program. The biggest challenge, he says, is doing so across an organization where programs sometimes operate under different regulatory systems and serve people with widely varying needs.

Fonseca joined ServiceNet in November 2025. His task, as he sees it, is to accommodate the differences while creating a common educational framework around them. ServiceNet’s mental health, developmental disability, brain injury, and other programs may use different terminology and work with different agencies, but Fonseca believes much of the underlying work comes back to the same thing: understanding, valuing, and respecting people.

He is also working on developing and streamlining specific trainings as he goes. His current efforts include centralizing training through the Relias learning management system, developing an agency-wide compliance training library, expanding medical and behavior-related education, and recertifying staff in vehicle and wheelchair safety. He is also offering two workshops for first-time homebuyers, a project he developed with Vice President of Community Relations Amy Timmins. (The second of the two workshops is Friday, Aug. 28, at noon, at ServiceNet’s Springfield office at 220 Brookdale Drive.)

Online learning is an important part of that work, but Fonseca still believes in the importance of face-to-face interactions. He travels to ServiceNet programs to conduct trainings in person, often staying afterward to spend time with staff.

Employees are sometimes surprised by how far he comes to see them, he said, and how long he stays.

“That is teaching too,” he said.

His larger goal is to create a culture where ServiceNet employees feel connected to one another and invested in learning, and where the same attention to individual strengths that staff bring to the people they serve is extended to employees themselves.

“Feeling seen and appreciated and respected is huge,” Fonseca said.

Although Fonseca’s own education started in school, his artistic and entrepreneurial passions soon expanded his horizons and his perspective.

He first wanted to be an artist, a plan his family opposed as impractical. In high school, with little money for supplies, he began making small drawings and paintings and selling them on the street for a dollar or two, using the proceeds to buy more materials. Soon he was making posters and T-shirts, improvising a screen-printing operation in his family’s garage.

“I wasn’t making any money, because I was just buying more art materials,” he said.

In 1989, after being turned away by a string of galleries, Fonseca tried one more. He parked his beat-up Mazda in San Juan’s fashionable Santurce gallery district and walked into the famed Botello Gallery carrying a photo of his work. He didn’t have an appointment but, to get through the door, he pretended he did.

He was waiting nervously in the lobby, wondering how he was going to explain himself, when he met with an extraordinary stroke of luck: a former mentor, now associated with the gallery, happened to walk into the room. He immediately told her the situation, and she agreed to vouch for him. The gallery director gave him a wall to hang his art, and his first piece sold within 20 minutes for a price he couldn’t believe.

“That’s what paid for college,” he said.

A month later, his first show sold out before it opened. His art became his livelihood for more than 15 years, expanding across printmaking, painting, installation, film, and video. Institutions displaying his works now include the Caguas Museum of Fine Art, the Museum of the University of Puerto Rico, and The Institute of Puerto Rican Art in San Juan. He is also a member of the faculty at Clark University, where he has worked for 16 years in the Visual and Performing Arts Department as a professor of practice.

For Fonseca, art and teaching have never been entirely separate. Both are ways of asking people to look more closely at an idea, another person, or themselves.

In building the learning and development program at ServiceNet, Fonseca is creating opportunities for learning on a much larger scale, not only through courses and training systems, but by helping workers learn from one another and better understand the people they serve.

“Education,” he said, “is not a classroom. It’s a way of living.”

ServiceNet provides essential services to people living with mental health challenges, developmental delay or disability, brain injury, homelessness, and other challenges. To learn more about our programs, visit www.servicenet.org or call 413-585-1300.