FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

LINK HOUSTON ANNOUNCES GABRIELA BARAHONA AS NEW DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT

 

HOUSTON, Monday July 22, 2024 – LINK Houston is excited to welcome Gabriela Barahona as our new Director of Development.

Gabriela is a first-generation Honduran American whose life and career inform her daily pursuit of a world where every person can move freely and safely toward opportunity.  

Before joining LINK Houston, Gabriela led programming and advocacy at Texas Jail Project where she implemented the organization’s first direct aid program, guiding financial grants to families of incarcerated people. During her time at Texas Jail Project, Gabriela helped quadruple the organization’s budget and grew its digital audience by more than 900%. Her fundraising experience in the Gulf Coast South ecosystem equipped her with innovative funding strategies for systems-level-advocacy and resourcing movements with integrity.  

As a member organizer with Stop TxDOT I-45, Gabriela has become a transit storyteller. In organizing against the I-45 freeway expansion, Gabriela reflected on her own family’s experience living and moving in Houston. At the core of her advocacy is the knowledge that the same structural inequities that forced her family into unaffordable car ownership were the same inequalities that made them more likely to be criminalized on their way to work, to school, or the doctor’s office. 

Across these organizations, and now at LINK Houston, Gabriela is committed to making movement possible, meeting and equipping Houstonians where they are: on the way to opportunity.  

In her free time, Gabriela enjoys vegan cooking, living a car-free life on her bike and the bus, and hanging out with her rescue dog Benny.

LINK Houston advocates for a robust and equitable transportation network so that all people can reach opportunity. The organization envisions a community fabric where all people have the freedom of mobility to access the opportunities their vibrant communities offer. To make that vision a reality, LINK Houston supports transformative and inclusive policies, systems, initiatives, and infrastructure development that connect people to opportunity by transit, walking, rolling, and biking. LINK Houston moves ideas into action through community engagement, research, and shaping public policy.

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Media contact: Nick Arcos, nick@linkhouston.org, (713)906-8345