Growing up, Ernesto Fonseca worked many jobs, including as restaurant server and factory painter, to help pay the bills.

But he has come a long way, he said. Fonseca now works at ASU’s Stardust Center for Affordable Homes and the Family as an architect designer, building sustainable and economical homes to help make the world a “greener” place.

He has been named on the Phoenix Business Journal’s “Forty Under 40” list — an annual list that honors young people who make a difference in the Phoenix area.

Fonseca, an environmental-planning graduate student, said he works to build sustainable homes that average families can maintain to provide them with a green yet cost-effective lifestyle.

“Families spend an immense amount of money on utilities or sacrifice their comfort if they cannot afford them,” Fonseca said, “and that is not right.”

Concentrating on multicultural communities, Fonseca said he loves to help provide families with a place to live that is in harmony with their culture. He was able to do just that in 2006, when he led the Stardust Center’s Design/Build project in Guadalupe.

Fonseca worked with the Stardust Center and a nonprofit organization, YouthBuild Guadalupe, to build a green home for a family in Guadalupe. Fonseca said he worked with the community through town-hall-like meetings to design the house so it would be in character with the rest of the community.

“We designed the house to be a passive-solar house, which takes advantage of the climate in order to cool or heat the house without mechanical systems like AC or a furnace,” Fonseca said. But the cultural aspect was just as important as the sustainable part, he said.

“We gathered the community,” Fonseca said. “The best way to raise cultural activities is by gathering the community [members] themselves, so they can tell you what they want to see in their buildings.”

Fonseca’s efforts were successful and made a long-lasting impression on the Guadalupe community, said Gail Acosta, the then-community-development director for the city of Guadalupe.

“Ernesto brought a wonderful leadership quality and became a part of the community,” Acosta said. “There was a huge trust element that he was able to build [with the community].”

Since then, Fonseca said he has worked with other communities in sustainable living.

In 2005, a student studying housing development went to the Stardust Center and said he wanted to give back to his community by means of green housing. The center and a group of ASU students, led by Fonseca, went to Nageezi, N.M., for three months to rebuild a home for Navajo elders. The home was sustainable and culturally oriented, Fonseca said.

Now, Fonseca is giving back to his own home — the country of Mexico. He is the master planner for a 900-acre, 400-unit eco-village in La Paz, Mexico. The village will include a wellness center, a botanical garden, two clubhouses and a 200-acre nature reserve that will be maintained in a sustainable and affordable manner, he said.

Stefan Jacob, founder of Planet, an environmentally friendly cleaning-product company and developer of the eco-village, said choosing Fonseca to be the planner and designer was simple because of his dedication to sustainability and affordability.

“So many people focus on the word ‘sustainable,’ which also goes hand and hand with ‘expensive,’” Jacob said. “And the fact that Ernesto has been able to come up with individual plans and plans for communities that are inexpensive and yet really sustainable is great.”

And though Fonseca said he has a lot on his plate — with projects, working at the Stardust Center and going to school — it is all worth it to make a positive difference.

“I really like to fight for social and environmental change,” Fonseca said. “I think that’s a core value that I have always had, but I think it’s having an impact now.”

Reach the reporter at abigail.gilmore@asu.edu.