SAC alum and philanthropist Estela Avery makes a career of helping others

After 10 years as a nurse, San Antonio College alum Estela Avery found a new way to help others.

She’s spent the last three decades serving the community through nonprofit organizations as a volunteer, board member, and as executive director of the San Antonio River Foundation.

While her path from ICU nurse to nonprofit leader may be unusual, the underlying motivation is the same.

“It all really goes back to how I started out, in wanting to help others,” she said.

Avery knew in high school that she wanted to be a nurse. But after graduating from Providence Catholic School in San Antonio, college was financially out of reach.

She married and traveled for 12 years with her husband during his Army service before returning home to San Antonio with her two children to study nursing at SAC.

As a non-traditional student, she felt nervous and overwhelmed. Fortunately, the professors in some of her toughest classes were understanding. Dr. Barry Welch, an anatomy and physiology professor, was especially supportive.

“He had quite a few of us that were in their late 20s and early 30s, most of us young moms,” she said. “He was very good about making us feel comfortable as students and explaining things that needed to be explained.”

Her chemistry professor, John Paparelli, was also helpful.

“Those kinds of professors really made it possible for us to continue,” she said. “We knew we could go and ask for help.”

Nursing school brought greater challenges. The coursework was demanding and expectations were high.

“The nursing professors were a little bit tougher. They would tell us, ‘You’re going to get through it one way or the other,” she said. “We needed someone to tell us that, though.”

Her time at SAC proved to be a lifeline as her marriage ended while she was a student.

“It changed my life completely,” she said. “I knew that going through nursing school I would have the ability to support myself and my children.”

She realized that all her hard work was paying off when she began to do clinical rotations in hospitals. She noticed that SAC nursing school students were better prepared than students from other nursing schools.

Once she graduated and began working at Nix Hospital in San Antonio, that opinion was reinforced.

“It was very obvious to me and some of the other staff that [SAC graduates] were very well prepared,” she said. “I don’t know if it was because the program was so intense, or the other students were younger and not as mature, but I really did feel like we were better nurses.”

She started as an ICU nurse in San Antonio and worked as a nurse on the medical-surgical floor at the VA hospital in Kerrville. Along the way, she remarried and eventually retired from professional nursing but volunteered as a nurse at the Salvation Army Clinic in Kerrville and the Good Samaritan Center in Fredericksburg, Texas.

Her husband, the jewelry store founder and designer James Avery, was highly active in their Hill Country community and was involved in nonprofit boards. She began serving on boards too.

She took the role seriously. At one board training, she was impressed by Marion Lee and Michael Bacon, owners of the consulting firm conducting the session. She became inspired to learn more and become a nonprofit consultant.

“I felt I could be more effective as a board member and maybe broaden my horizons by finding out what these consultants did, how they did it and what it involved,” she said.

When Lee heard about an opening on the board of the San Antonio River Foundation, she encouraged Avery to pursue it. The foundation, which is the nonprofit partner to the San Antonio River Authority, works to preserve and enhance the San Antonio River Basin.

Avery made the leap from serving on smaller boards to a larger, more complex organization.

“Now there’s this river authority, the city and the county, the Army Corps of Engineers, all these people you’re working with,” she said. “I thought, wow, what have I gotten myself into?”

One of her first efforts as a board member was to help plan a grand opening celebration for the opening of the Museum Reach, a 3.5-mile linear riverfront park extending north from downtown.

When the executive director of the foundation left, Avery offered to serve as the interim director until a new one could be hired. When a new leader still hadn’t been found after six months, she told them she couldn’t be the interim executive director forever.

“And that’s how I became the executive director,” she said.

She was now in a leadership role among longtime board members, all prominent men with strong personalities. The first few executive committee meetings were tense, Avery said.

“One of them used to love to raise his voice and pound his fist on the table,” she recalled “I said, ‘My husband doesn’t do that, so I don’t expect that from any of you guys either.’ That cleared the air.”

Following the success of the Museum Reach, the San Antonio River Foundation was searching for its next project. Under Avery’s direction, that project turned out to be Confluence Park, which transformed a vacant lot on the city’s South Side into an outdoor education center along the river.

It wasn’t an easy sell, Avery said. Instead of a traditional park with swing sets and barbecue pits, she championed a center for environmental education, where students and others could learn about the ecology of the San Antonio River and South Texas.

“I was told it was not the right location. It was getting harder and harder to raise money, and I kept telling them I think you’ll have a lot more people get involved if it’s about education for the underserved side of San Antonio,” she said. “I was very determined it was going to happen.”

Although she stepped down as executive director in 2017, Avery occasionally goes to Confluence Park to see school groups visiting. She’s received notes from students who tell her what they learned there. Since opening in March 2018, children from more than 70 schools have visited the park.

“You can go anytime during the week and see the school buses parked there,” she said. “It’s like yep, this was the right thing. I was in the right place at the right time.”

Her commitment to environmental preservation extends beyond San Antonio. As a board member of the National Parks Conservation Association for ten years (her tenure ended in 2025), she gained a deeper appreciation for the nation’s park system.

“To me it was an eye-opener as to how many there were, that the American people really do own those parks and that we need to protect them,” she said. “Sometimes it worries me that people in America don’t appreciate that we have these great parks like people visiting from other countries do.”

Today, the nonprofit world is still a big part of her life. She splits her time between the Hill Country and San Antonio, serving as a trustee of Schreiner University in Kerrville and as a board member for the Grace Center in Fredericksburg and the San Antonio Young Women’s Leadership Academy.

For her many professional accomplishments, philanthropy and community service, San Antonio College will award Avery an honorary Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree at this year’s spring commencement.

Looking back on her start in the SAC nursing department, she is happy to see both the nursing program and the college continue to grow and make education accessible to more people.

“I think they are making it possible in every way for a student to get in there, no excuses,” she said. “If you really want to go to college, there it is. Go for it.”

-SAC-