About Maria Carrion
Maria Carrion was born and raised in Lorain, Ohio. Her father made another trip to Mexico to marry her mother and moved her to Lorain where she was a homemaker and took care of Maria and her six siblings. From a young age, Maria always had the drive to be independent and a passion for teaching. Despite limiting expectations for women in the early seventies and the challenges of being a first generation college student, Maria graduated from Northeastern University with a degree in Business Administration. She then went on to have an impressive corporate career in the pharmaceutical industry across many different cities and several countries before changing course in search of more fulfilling work. After getting her graduate degree in Health and Human Services, she returned to Lorain to care for her dying mother. Being faced with her mother's mortality caused Maria to rethink her own life and search for ways to give back to the community. Today, she is doing just that as Manager of Housing and Physical Development at El Centro de Servicios Sociales. She does not know what the future holds, but hopes to have at least one more adventure living outside the US.
“I consider myself blessed because I think that life doesn’t give everybody the opportunities I have…Not everybody gets an opportunity to work outside of the US, understand both their parents’ culture, live it and experience it, and have an opportunity to come back to where they came from and give back to the community that they were born in. That to me is a blessing, so I’m grateful for that.” - Maria Carrion, 2020
Read about El Centro's housing program earning federal certification, one of Maria's many accomplishments.