5-11-26 | Partnership Success Partnerships
If you missed Part 1, start with Elmer’s story here.
The best development work doesn’t start with an outside plan. Meaningful change starts with the people who already know what their community needs. That’s where Fabretto begins.
What Happens When You Start Growing Together
In 2025, for the first time, Fabretto brought together the organizations that make up the Comunidad Fabretto partner network for a regional gathering. Ten organizations. 30 people. Three full days in the same space, learning from each other, building trust, and asking the question that too few development organizations stop to ask:
What impact is generated when we grow together instead of separately?
The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot.
Building trust across 12 organizations in two countries is not simple. It takes time, honesty, and a willingness to be changed by what you hear. But when it happens, something shifts.
Alejandro Martínez, Executive Director of Asociación BAYAN, captured it after the gathering:
That is the Comunidad Fabretto.
12 Partners. Two Countries. One Shared Vision.
The Comunidad Fabretto partner network grew to 12 impact partners in 2025, spanning Honduras and Guatemala. These partners are independent organizations with deep roots in their communities, their own leadership, and their own expertise. Each one knows its community in ways that no outside organization ever could. Each one shows up every day, not because Fabretto sent them, but because they are from there.
Fabretto’s role is not to lead from the front. Our role is to walk alongside: sharing methodologies, resources, and a network that multiplies what each partner can do alone.
What “Growing Together” Actually Looks Like
Denis, Director of Un Mundo, remembers when Fabretto first reached out. His team had just completed a needs assessment identifying youth entrepreneurship as a critical gap in the Cangrejal River area of Honduras, and Fabretto arrived at exactly the right moment, bringing knowledge, tools, and financial support to develop a pilot that will shape how the program grows for years to come.
In 2025, that partnership opened new opportunities for 9 young people, supporting the creation of 7 new entrepreneurial ideas, including small livestock ventures, agricultural projects, and community-based businesses built by young people who had never considered themselves entrepreneurs before. Across Honduras, Fabretto’s youth entrepreneurship programs trained 165 young people and supported 28 new businesses.
These numbers do not happen because Fabretto parachutes in with a plan. They happen because a local organization already knew what was needed and found a partner willing to listen.
Learning to Measure Impact
The first-ever Comunidad Fabretto regional gathering brought 30 participants from 10 organizations together for three days to build a skill too often overlooked in the sector: measuring and communicating social impact. Not just counting outputs, but understanding and articulating what actually changes in people’s lives.
But something else happened too. As organizations shared their work, their challenges, and their methods, a larger question began to take shape: how do we create shared impact? Not parallel impact. Not competing impact. Impact that multiplies because organizations choose to build it together.
30 participants. 10 organizations. 3 days.
And something shifted. Not just in what people learned, but in how they saw themselves. Not as isolated organizations doing their best in underserved spaces, but as part of something larger. A community with shared values, shared challenges, and a shared commitment to the children and youth they serve.
Why This Model Matters
The organizations in the Comunidad Fabretto network were in Guatemala and Honduras before Fabretto arrived. The United Nations Development Programme, drawing on two decades of experience, has documented the central role local organizations play in achieving and sustaining development gains, in ways that outside organizations cannot replicate. Communities that drive their own solutions are more likely to maintain, adapt, and expand them over time.
Fabretto’s role is to be a catalyst, not a replacement. To strengthen what is already there. To connect what might otherwise work in isolation.
Kevin Marinacci, CEO of Fabretto Children’s Foundation, reflected on this in his letter opening our 2025 Annual Report: the how and where of Fabretto’s work has changed over the years, but the commitment to giving life to Padre Fabretto’s spirit of service alongside communities, not above them, has not.
In 2025, 43,500+ students were reached across Guatemala and Honduras. 370+ teachers and staff were trained. 2.8 million school meals were served. Behind every one of those numbers is a local partner organization that made it happen on the ground.
No one grows alone.
You Are Part of This Too
The Comunidad Fabretto is still growing. New partners. New programs. New possibilities for what becomes achievable when organizations stop competing for space and start creating it for each other.
And we are just getting started. This August, Fabretto will bring the Comunidad Fabretto together again for our second gathering – another opportunity to learn, connect, and grow stronger as a network. We cannot wait to share what comes out of it.
Thank you for growing with us.
Don’t forget to read Fabretto’s 2025 Annual Report to see everything your support has made possible.
