M Lucia Barbeyto
MARIA LUCIA BARBEYTO M.A.
Maria Lucía Barbeyto, known as Lucía, is the founder and CEO of Family Support Coalition. She was born and raised in Spain and have lived in Miami, Florida since 1999.
Lucía’s professional journey began in business. She graduated Summa Cum Laude as a first-generation college graduate from Keiser University with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, with a concentration in International Business. She was inducted to the Delta Mu Delta Business Honor Society and later earned a master’s degree in Project Management.
Over more than a decade, Lucia held leadership roles in finance, business consulting, project management, and operations. But her most transformative journey began at home.
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Lucía is the mother of two young adults, Héctor and Lucía. When Héctor was two, he was diagnosed with autism. Because of developmental delays related to his autism, he was expelled from his childcare center. Years later, at eleven, Hector developed intractable epilepsy, adding another layer of complexity to an already demanding caregiving journey. To make things worse, in 2017, Hector had a serious accident while he was in the public school system, and his parents made the difficult decision to homeschool him permanently. Caring for Héctor changed the direction of Lucia's life. Faced with systems that often felt fragmented, difficult to navigate, and overwhelming, she began learning everything she could about disability rights, education, advocacy, and family support. What started as a mother’s search for answers gradually became a lifelong commitment to helping other families.
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Lucia became a Certified Advocate after completing a program offered by the Florida Developmental Disability Council. (FDDC). She also served for three years as a board member of the Florida State Advisory Committee for the Education of Exceptional Students (SAC) at the Florida Department of Education (FDOE). After taking the hard decision of step away from the successful career she had built in the business sector, Lucia decided to go back to school to further her advancement in learning about early childhood development. She co-founded a preschool for children born to 5 years old with and without disabilities, from which she was the director for 3 years.
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Working closely with children and families confirmed something she had been feeling for some time: she wanted the next chapter of her career to focus on improving the way children with developmental differences and their families are supported. To build the professional knowledge needed to do that, Lucía returned to school once again and she earned a Graduate Certificate in Positive Behavior Support and a second master’s degree in Applied Behavior Analysis from the University of South Florida.
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Today, Lucía brings together something few professional paths provide: Her business background had taught her how to look at organizations, manage resources, build processes, and recognize where systems could work better.
Her training in behavior analysis, together with her knowledge and experience in early childhood development, gave her the professional foundation to guide families with care and evidence-based information, particularly when concerns arise about a child’s development and parents need help understanding what they are seeing and what to do next.
In addition, her own journey as a mother of a son with severe disability had taught her something no degree could fully capture: what it feels like to need help and have no idea where to begin. This experience combined guides her work today: bringing together everything she has learned as a mother, behavior analyst, advocate, and business leader to build services around the real needs of families.
