You did it!

Thanks to your generous support, we met our end-of-year match challenge from the Esperanza Board of Advisors–an astounding $24,000 in new scholarship money!

Scholar Spotlight

Rubina, an immigrant from Nepal, is completing her freshman year at Virginia Tech where she is studying engineering and has a 3.75 GPA. She has already taken advantage of myriad opportunities at college, and she is an active member of the VEX robotics team and a voting member of the Student Engineers’ Council. She volunteers at various engineering events, including the FIRST Lego League Competition, the VEX Robotics Regional Competition, and the October Sky Festival, a rocket launching competition. She was selected to attend GE Aviation’s Female Diversity Recruitment Leadership Summit where she interviewed and was selected for their Early Identification Internship; this internship will last throughout her four years of college, including during the summers, and should open doors into full time employment after she graduates. Thanks to your support, Esperanza is supporting Rubina with a $10,000 scholarship.

Learn more about other scholars like Rubina that you support through Esperanza by clicking here.

Was your New Year’s resolution to become more involved in your community? Have you been looking for an opportunity to use your skills to benefit others and meet like-minded, passionate people committed to a worthy cause? Esperanza is looking for volunteers for our various committees – development, mentorship, and scholarship. You can help plan networking and fundraising events, work directly with our scholars, read new scholarship applications, help us on social media, and more. We are actively looking for volunteers for our annual Career Day on March 14th and for our annual benefit concert on April 24th.

We wouldn’t exist without an amazing group of volunteers – click here for more information!

Our 2015 scholarship application is now available, and hundreds of local high school seniors have already started working on it. We anticipate at least 400 completed applications, and will need readers to help us narrow the pool. Click here for more information about volunteering to read and score applications. And if you know immigrant students graduating from high school in DC, MD, or VA who plans to attend a public college or university, you can send them this link to our application.

Mark your calendar for our annual benefit concert on Friday, April 24, 2015 at the Mexican Cultural Institute. We are thrilled that for the first time ever our featured performer will be an Esperanza scholar! Keep your eyes out for more information, including when tickets go on sale.

Thanks for all you do for Esperanza! We couldn’t do it without you.

- Team Esperanza

Exciting news!

We are thrilled to announce that Esperanza has been awarded a two-year, $50,000 grant from the Philip L. Graham Fund to support scholarships, mentorship programming, and operations, as well as a $15,000 grant from The Meyer Foundation to support communications. You should be proud too—your commitment to this work helped lay the groundwork for these generous grants.

Scholar Update

Santiago Vinueza is one of the 60 Esperanza Scholars you have helped support over the past five years. We know you will be as impressed with Santiago as we are! With his Esperanza scholarship he attended Sargeant Reynold’s Community College and graduated with a 4.0 GPA. He then transferred to Virginia Tech on a full scholarship, all while working two jobs. When we asked Santiago what he would like to say to you, he wrote: “Esperanza helped me in two ways. The first was paying for my education expenses. The second, and the one that means the most to me, is by helping me realize how fortunate I am to have the opportunity to continue studying and reminding me that there’s always hope even when all seems lost. Those two factors enabled me to not only survive this past year but accomplish significant things.”

Learn more about other scholars like Santiago that you support through Esperanza by clicking here.

Mentor on the Move

In addition to providing financial support, Esperanza matches each interested scholar with a mentor. Recently, one of our mentors, Patricia Silva-Santisteban, teamed up with an Esperanza Board of Advisors member to take her mentee, Bibiana Valdes (a 2013 Esperanza Scholar studying engineering at Prince George’s Community College), to the University of Pennsylvania to meet with a Puerto Rican-born electrical engineering professor, Jorge Santiago Aviles. Our volunteers reported that Professor Santiago “could not have been more warm and welcoming. He spent three hours with us, took us to visit several key people, and gave us a tour of his nanotechnology lab.”  Below Bibiana is pictured with Professor Santiago in front of a piece of the world’s first computer, ENIAC, which was built at Penn in the 1940s.

Learn more about the Esperanza mentorship program here!

Rooftop Reception

Thank you to everyone who attended our Rooftop Reception on September 2! We had a great turnout of nearly 100 people, including old and new friends, in spite of the stormy weather. Before the rain started the crowd heard from 2014 Esperanza Scholar Brenda Perez, pictured speaking below.

Thanks for all you do for Esperanza! We couldn’t do it without you.

- Alex, Alice, Alison, Alvaro, Andy, Francella, Jason, Marie, Maritza, Jason, Roman, and the rest of the Esperanza team