Alternative STEM education: A noncollege path to jobs for students from underrepresented groups in STEM fields by Olivia Sanchez July 31, 2024

I loved this piece from the Hechinger Report that I came across this week in the Austin American Statesman. The report draws on data from the 2023 Diversity and STEM: Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities government analysis by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.

Black and brown youth account for significantly under-represented Science and Engineering (S & E) degree recipients at the bachelor’s degree level and above. In contrast and from a perspective of equity related to access to STEM courses and fields throughout primary, secondary, and higher education, White and Asian students are overrepresented among S&E degree recipients at the bachelor's level and higher. In 2020, White students earned 70 percent and Asian students 11 percent of S & E doctoral degrees. 

I do not discount the enormous variation within the Asian community and recognize that these data do not apply to all subgroups. Within the white community, as with all communities, clearly coming from a higher class background is also impactful in terms of representation in STEM fields.

There has been progress among women, generally, albeit the data do not disaggregate further either by race/ethnicity or class. In 2021, 68% of female STEM workers had S & E-related jobs, including healthcare workers, managers, pre-college teachers, and technicians. Women made up 65% of workers in these S&E-related occupations.

In the STEM workforce, 46% of workers with at least one disability held middle-skill jobs, compared to 38% of those without a disability. Fewer STEM workers with disabilities were in S & E-related occupations compared to those without disabilities (29% vs. 37%). Another related finding is STEM workers without disabilities were evenly split between the skilled technical workforce (49%) and those with at least a bachelor’s degree (51%). Clearly, access to STEM occupations for those with disabilities remains a pressing policy issue. So glad to get access to this vitally important information. 

The Statesman article below provides added detail on the wisdom of engaging the nonprofit sector with respect to alternative, tuition-free routes to STEM opportunities for youth from low-income communities that simply don't have the funds or competitive advantage—due to such things as under-funded schools at the K-12 level and consequently, an unstable teacher workforce—to attend college to attain advanced degrees in STEM. It does note the important role that the donor and tech sectors, as well as colleges and universities, can simultaneously play via partnerships with such programs to create pathways into college programs. 

-Angela Valenzuela

Reference

Sanchez, O. (2024). Alternative STEM education: free, short-term programs offer non-college path to tech jobs. The Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/

National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. (2023, January 30). Diversity and STEM: Women, minorities, and persons with disabilities

(NSF 23-315). Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, National Science Foundation. Alexandria, VA. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315/report

The Marcy Lab School offers students from low-income backgrounds free, short-term training in software engineering, with a goal of placing them in tech jobs quickly. Credit: Olivia Sanchez/The Hechinger Report

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — About one and a half years ago, Isaiah Hickerson woke up in the middle of the night having dreamt he was a coder.

The dream was totally random, as dreams so often are. He didn’t know a thing about coding.

He was 23, and though originally from California, he’d been living with his uncle in Miami. By day, he was answering phones in the grooming department at PetSmart. After hours, he was trying to figure out what to do with his life.


He’d tried social media. And he’d taken some community college classes in business and biology. He was lukewarm on both.

“I just felt empty,” Hickerson said. “I wanted to do something different, but I just didn’t know what it was. I didn’t have a passion for anything. And I didn’t know what passion felt like.”

Isaiah Hickerson, who left Miami to attend the nonprofit Marcy Lab School in Brooklyn, New York, is studying software engineering there. Credit: Olivia Sanchez/The Hechinger Report

He knows how far-fetched it sounds, but seeing himself coding in the dream changed him. Moments after he woke up, he was online trying to figure out what it all meant.

“I remember the whole entire thing and it’s crazy. I can’t make it up,” Hickerson said. “I literally got up right from there, 2 in the morning, probably 2:05. I remember the whole entire timeline because this is what shifted — my dream is what brought me here.”

By “here,” Hickerson means the Marcy Lab School in Brooklyn, New York, where he’s nearly finished with a one-year software engineering fellowship program. It’s not a college or a for-profit tech boot camp, but a nonprofit, tuition-free program designed to help students from historically underrepresented communities — like Hickerson, who is Black — get high-paying jobs in tech.

Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

Across the country, colleges and universities offer scores of programs designed to help students from underrepresented groups succeed in STEM education and prepare for tech careers. Far less common are independent nonprofits that focus on students who don’t have the resources to go to college, don’t want to go to college or don’t believe they can succeed in a demanding STEM program. These nonprofits offer short-term training programs, for free, and help with job placement.

Two prominent examples, on opposite coasts, are the Marcy Lab School and Hack the Hood, in Oakland, California. Hack the Hood conducts 12-week data science-training programs and has recently partnered with Laney College, a community college in Oakland, to offer students a certificate of achievement in data science.

Data from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics shows that Black and Latino people earn science and engineering bachelor’s degrees at a disproportionately low rate, are underrepresented in the college-educated STEM workforce and earn lower salaries in those jobs than their white and Asian peers.

Each morning at the Marcy Lab School begins with “mindful morning” activities, including prompts for gratitude and self-reflection. Credit: Olivia Sanchez/The Hechinger Report

Achieving better representation means finding ways to get students the academic and financial assistance they need. The financial resources needed for a four-year STEM degree — or even a two-year degree — can be prohibitive. Opening up shorter avenues that are free — or significantly less expensive than for-profit boot camps — can at least put students on the path toward a STEM career. Programs designed with these students in mind give them training so that they have a shot to compete for STEM jobs with salaries that can lead to economic and social mobility. (Both the Marcy Lab School and Hack the Hood are nonprofits funded by donations from philanthropic groups.)

Related: When universities slap their names on for-profit coding bootcamps

“STEM is a white, cis, heteronormative field,” Weverton Ataide Pinheiro, an assistant professor in the College of Education at Texas Tech University, said. “And these people are the only ones that are being able to get a slice of the pie. Actually, they’re eating the whole pie.”


For Ataide Pinheiro, these free alternative programs have value, regardless of whether they result in a college degree, if they allow people from historically marginalized groups to get just one step further than they would have gotten without the training.

“We are desperate to just try to support these folks because we know money matters,” Ataide Pinheiro said. “We know that they will only be able to compete if they have certain training, and they might not be able to pay [for it].”

Reuben Ogbonna, one of the Marcy Lab School’s co-founders, said his team has worked hard to establish partnerships with tech companies to get software engineering job opportunities for Marcy students when they finish the program. Ogbonna said a team of former educators and salespeople introduces Marcy to companies, hoping to convince them to consider Marcy students for roles that would typically require a bachelor’s degree.

To prevent Marcy students from being “met with a glass ceiling somewhere down the line” because of their nontraditional training, Ogbonna said that Marcy asks the companies to treat its students the way they’d treat anyone else in the job interview process so that they can prove their skills and show employers that they deserve equal treatment as they progress in their

 careers.

The Marcy Lab School is a nonprofit that offers students from historically disadvantaged groups a non-college pathway to careers in STEM. “We’re trying to reverse a really big problem that’s been around for a long time,” the co-founder said. Credit: Olivia Sanchez/The Hechinger Report

Since the Marcy Lab School opened in 2019, roughly 200 students have completed the program. In the first three years, about 80 percent of them graduated, and about 90 percent of those who graduated landed jobs in STEM with an average salary of $105,000 per year, according to Ogbonna. But in the past two years, during what Ogbonna called a tech recession, it’s been significantly more difficult for these students to get jobs. He said that this year, six months after graduating, about 60 percent of graduates had jobs.

Related: To attract more students to STEM fields in college, advocates urge starting in sixth grade

By pursuing an education at Marcy rather than attending a four-year college, students get three extra years to make money, build their savings and accrue wealth, Ogbonna said. And they won’t have student loans to pay off.

“We’re trying to reverse a really big problem that’s been around for a long time,” Ogbonna said. “And part of my theory of change is that if we can get wealth in the hands of our students earlier, it can come out exponentially for the communities that we’re serving.”

Both the Marcy Lab School and Hack the Hood also try to prepare students for what they might experience when they get into the workforce.

Hack the Hood serves students between the ages of 16 and 25 and, in addition to the technical curriculum, teaches students about racial equity, social justice issues and understanding their personal identities, said Samia Zuber, its executive director.

Zuber explained that these parts of the program help prepare students to confront issues such as imposter syndrome and to think critically about the work they are doing. For example, Zuber said, they teach students about racial bias in facial recognition software and the implications it can have for different communities.

This lesson was particularly striking for 24-year-old Lizbet Roblero Arreola, who recalled very little exposure to computer programming when she was in school.

“It really opens your eyes and makes you want to change it,” Roblero Arreola said, concerning the misuse of facial recognition data. “For me personally, I want to be somebody in those companies that doesn’t let that happen.”

For Roblero Arreola, a first-generation Mexican American, going to college was never a given. When she became pregnant with her first child shortly after graduating from high school, she decided to keep working in customer service jobs rather than go to college. Last year, after giving birth to her second child, she saw a friend post online about Hack the Hood. She’d been thinking about going back to school, and it seemed Hack the Hood could help ease her transition.

Roblero Arreola said that the Hack the Hood team supported her by helping her understand all the steps she would need to take to enroll at Laney College, including helping her figure out how to apply for financial aid. (Hack the Hood programs are tuition-free, but students who go on to pursue a certificate with Laney have to pay tuition there.)

After she finishes her associate degree in computer programming at Laney, she hopes to transfer to a four-year college and earn a bachelor’s degree. Eventually, she’d like to build a career in the cybersecurity field. She said she’s putting in the work now so that her children will have more opportunities than she did.

Related: Just 3% of scientists and engineers are Black or Latina women. Here’s what teachers are doing about it

These programs also serve students like Nicole Blanchette, an 18-year-old from a rural community in Connecticut, who chose Marcy Lab School over a traditional college experience.

Blanchette’s father has an associate degree, and her mother, who is Filipino, didn’t pursue postsecondary education. Blanchette always dreamed of going to college, and during her senior year of high school, she became intrigued by a career in tech. She hesitated, however, because “the stereotypical computer science student does not look like me.”

But an ad for Marcy Lab on Instagram made Blanchette think a tech career was possible.

She did the math and found that one year of living in New York would be cheaper than attending any of the colleges she’d gotten into, even with financial aid. She convinced her parents to spend the money they’d saved for her education on her living expenses while she attends Marcy.

Ogbonna and Marcy Lab’s other co-founder, Maya Bhattacharjee-Marcantonio, both started out as teachers and recruited the first class of Marcy students from their personal networks and from community organizations in Brooklyn.

Now, roughly 30 to 40 percent of Marcy Lab’s students are coming straight out of high school. Ogbonna said that for some of these students, “academic, economic and social barriers prevent them from being able to access a college that they can verify has strong outcomes.” They often believe they can’t afford any wrong turns. And for those who’ve already had some college, there’s often urgency to get a job because they need to pay back student loans or contribute financially to their households.

“Some of them were thinking about going to the short-term, very expensive coding boot camps,” Ogbunna said, and see a tuition-free program like Marcy Lab as “a less risky option.”

After feeling directionless and uninspired, Hickerson, who first thought about a career in coding after that vivid dream, now says he loves learning, and complex problem-solving tech challenges only make him want to learn more.

Before he started learning to code, he said he never knew what it felt like to be passionate about something. Now, when he talks about coding, what he’s learning in school and the career he hopes to build in software engineering, he doesn’t seem to ever stop smiling.

***

This story about STEM education programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

The (True) Origin of Wealth: Why Some Societies Prosper — and Others Collapse (Like America)

Umair Haque is a critical writer and thinker.  He looks for answers to his questions about wealth and poverty in economics and economic theory and they fall short.  I encourage him to read postcolonial scholars like Walter Mignolo, Maria Lugones, Anibal Quijano and others to get a perspective, coupled with deep histories, on colonization and decolonization.  Read in tandem with this piece by Tim Wise titled, "Western 'Superiority' is Killing us" where I specifically reference several of these postcolonial scholars’ writings.

-Angela Valenzuela

#GetWoke

The (True) Origin of Wealth

Why Some Societies Prosper — and Others Collapse (Like America)

by Umair Haque

There’s a question as old as economics itself: where does “wealth” really come from? Now, this question isn’t asked in the late-night infomercial sense. But in the genuine one: why are some countries rich, and others poor?

Nobody, really, has an answer to this question. There have been many answers proposed. Some — like Daron Acemoglu — say that wealth comes from institutions. Others, like the Chicago School, from freedom, or from its various branches, from property rights. Still others, like Schumpeter’s disciples, from “innovation” (whatever that even means anymore.

I was trained — maybe indoctrinated — in the arts of American economics. And for a long time, this question gnawed away at me. I couldn’t really accept any of the answers above. And worse, I couldn’t quite say why. They seemed lacking to me, in some basic human way, along some obvious and fatal dimension. Like the most straightforward thing in the world seemed to be missing from them.

Now, nobody in economics wants to engage with this question anymore much. Everybody’s picked a side — and if you ask it, you’ll basically get all the same old answers, just only more furiously, because that’s what happens when people bunker down in ideological foxholes. No thinking allowed — that’s modern economics’s credo. So the question — where does wealth really come from? — is still unanswered.

I began thinking about it, like I said, long ago. And after many years — go ahead and call me dumb, you’ll do it many times this essay, I almost guarantee you — it occurred to me that maybe the question itself was backwards.

Maybe the correct question isn’t: “where does wealth come from?”, but “where does poverty come from?”

Why did I think that? Well, because it was suspicious to me that economics started asking this question at the dawn of the colonial age. You see, for most of human history, nobody had ever asked the question “where does wealth come from?”, even though there were vast and glaring inequities in society, the Roman master reclining in his villa, fed by slaves.

I thought it was altogether too convenient that economics had suddenly started asking the question: “where does wealth come from?” at a precise and certain point in history. Not just any point — but the point when, well, the nations asking that question were busy enslaving and exploiting the world.

Yes, really. That’s not an overstatement. The Greeks and Romans had slaves, sure — but it was America (and Britain) who built an intercontinental slave trade, and chewed their way across the world like locusts. Roman and Greek slaves were debtors and prisoners of war, who could buy their way, often, into freedom — but American slaves, and European colonial subjects — they were different: they were subhuman. They were objects to be used and abused and discarded.

We did something truly horrific, my friends, the scale of which we have yet to grapple with. We constructed a world of predators and prey. We made ourselves the predators — and then invented science after science to justify it. There was a biology which said human beings are made of different nobilities, and evolve to different standards. There was a sociology that ascribed every kind of vice to that newfound biology’s defects.

And today I think that I rank economics in just that place: as a pseudoscience riddled through with the corrosion of supremacy. In just the same way we laugh today at a biology that said yesterday whites are genetically superior — so today we should begin laughing at an economics that asks the question: where does wealth come from?

After all, the answer is obvious. If by “wealth” we mean “the things and privileges and freedoms that American white people enjoyed”, then the origin of wealth couldn’t be more obvious. Slavery. Exploitation. Violence. Centuries of it.

Remember when I said the wrong question is “where does wealth come from?” and the right question is “why are some people poor?”

Is it just history’s biggest coincidence that the nations who were enslaved, exploited, and plundered for centuries are the ones who are still “poor” today? Is it just an even bigger coincidence that the pattern of their poverty follows the extent of their depredation and degradation — Africa mostly still savagely poor, which was brutally enslaved, Asia rising just a touch, which was allowed to live a little freer, and so on?

My friends, if you ask me to believe that is a coincidence, then you are also asking me to be a fool. It isn’t a coincidence that the rich world is the world that centuries of brutality made upon the poor world. Those two worlds are still vastly separate and vastly unequal because there is a relationship there.

They are poor because we are rich, and we are rich because they are poor.

You’d be correct to accuse me of “zero-sum thinking” right about now. But it isn’t really me you’re accusing. It’s the slavemasters, who were our forefathers in the rich West. They are the ones who thought that they could only really prosper if other limbs did all the work, and other bodies sweated. Not all of them thought that — but enough did. The zero-sum thinking isn’t mine. It’s history’s. And so like I said — to not see a rich world that was also a predatory one, and a poor world that was also a brutalized one by that very rich world is not to see the world at all, I think.

You’d also be correct to say something like: “but what about innovation! Science! Technology! These things have made us rich!!” Correct. But only in an incorrect way. Darwin discovered evolution precisely because Britain had a class of aristocrats who could think at leisure — but that was only really possible because there was an empire slaving away to make them tea and crumpets. Edison invented the lightbulb — but only because there was a whole economy of slaves behind him, picking that cotton, giving him the freedom to do a thing only a white man could, which was dedicate his life to something better than slavery.

Do you see what I mean? In economic jargon, slavery and exploitation were the “primary public good” that created “positive externalities”…for the true humans, for whites, for masters, to enjoy. The slaves and colonial subjects were the ones investing their labour and sweat, their broken bodies and minds, to ultimately create all those grand things the masters took for granted — whether tea and crumpets or debating halls to propound fine theories in.

Now, you might think: well, that only means we should enslave the world all over again. Science! Tech! Progress! But you are wrong.

I’ve told you a dismal story so far. It goes like this. Economics keeps asking what the origin of wealth is. And curiously, suspiciously, it began asking that question at just the time the societies asking it were getting rich by enslaving much of the world. Call it a psychological defense mechanism, call it a case of protesting too much…call it a case of not being able to see the obvious.

The rich world didn’t get rich through some kind of noble virtue — it grew wealthy by taking what was the poor world’s. Minerals and oil and dust and trees and gems. But not just that, and not really that. Labour. Lives. Possibilities.

You see, we will never know — never — how many Einsteins or Edisons or Salks there might have been among all those lives that were shattered and destroyed. Ever. We have no idea of the possibilities that were lost. They are uncountable and infinite. Who can say what that beautiful mind might have discovered — the one picking the tea? Who can say what that person might have created — the one bent over the mine? What about the one serving the tea, and hammering together the shackle for another slave?

We will never know. I feel a terrible grief when I write that sentence. Do you feel it, just a touch of it? A kind of sorrow as deep as an ocean and as wide as winter hits me, all at once. I feel like I’m drowning. Like I’m numb.

How could we have built a world like that? A world so ugly? So morally wrong? So stupid and foolish? Were our forefathers really such violent and disgusting people?

I’m sorry. Do you feel insulted? Forgive me, maybe. I still feel that grief of all those lost lives, all that possibility…gone.

But let me come back to the point. One way to think about the above is: the West got wealthy by enslaving the world, but at least we now have science and medicine and technology and whatnot.

But that is absolutely wrong. The correct question, if you understand all the above, is this.

The West got wealthy by enslaving the world, but if it hadn’t enslaved the world, what might have happened?

Well, for an example, for some insight, we can look at. modern Europe versus America. America didn’t invest in itself. It chose violence instead. It thought that if everyone just exploited everyone else enough, that somehow — don’t ask me how — it would prosper. Cruelty and greed would breed virtue and discipline and toughness.

But it was wrong. Everyone exploiting everyone else only led, in the end, to what America is now: a failed state and a collapsed society.

All that wealth created by centuries of slavery…where is it now? The average American dies in debt, literally. He never owns or saves or earns anything, in real net terms. So that wealth can’t be with him. That wealth is not anywhere, really — not even in the hands of the billionaires, who just own a tiny portion of the majority of what’s left of it. All that wealth created by centuries of exploitation…America squandered it. On toys and trinkets and wars. Hence, it ended up a failed state.

I want to put that in a way you really understand.

It went in a circle. Americans arrived on the shores of a Promised Land, poor and desperate. They enslaved whom they couldn’t exterminate. They grew rich on the labour of others they considered subhumans. But where did it all end up? Nowhere — because today, the average American…dies broke.

Do you see the terrible irony? Ah, but do you see the terrible lesson? The horrific truth? All that savagery, brutality, the hatred and suffering of slavery…was for nothing. Americans didn’t end up rich. They only ended up poor. Precisely because the ghosts of the enslaved haunt them to this very day, ripping old wounds open, whispering — “which subhumans will you hurt today?”

The lesson — which economics doesn’t seem able to see, much less learn — couldn’t be clearer.

Wealth earned through violence and exploitation doesn’t endure and last. But see the paradox: the origin of wealth is exploitation and violence — but only of a certain kind of wealth. A thin kind, let us say. One as costly as it is heavy to carry.

And now let’s look at Europe. There are those who’ll say: Europe had colonies too! They are right. But after the war, whatever wealth Europe had was literally ashes and dust. Europe began with nothing. Literally nothing. A little investment from America, to be sure — but all those centuries of slavery and exploitation were wiped out by the war. It’s nations weren’t wealthy anymore — they were now poor, devastated, and ruined.

And yet in one human lifetime, Europe rose from ashes to enjoy the world’s highest living standards. Without, crucially, this time, violence and exploitation and slavery. For the first time in history. Do you see how momentous and beautiful that is?

The true secret of wealth revealed itself, at last. At least to those with eyes to see.

Europe’s secret wasn’t America’s initial pool of investment. It could easily have squandered that, too.

Europe’s secret was simply…people investing in each other. Modern European societies were the first ones in human history, ever, anywhere, anytime, to guarantee people healthcare, retirement, transport, media, income, savings, shelter, food, safety, even dignity…as basic human rights.

Nobody in history had ever attempted that. American economists, by the way, laughed and that it was all going to be a a miserable failure.

Now, European leaders did all that for a strange reason. Not to get rich — but to have peace. The idea was simply that desperate people won’t turn on one another — because a hungry person will do anything to fill their childs’ belly. Americans laughed at that idea — they championed exploiting and abusing each other, the ghost of the slavemaster haunting them.

Which idea won? Exploitation, or investment?

The answer should be obvious — though it’s probably not. Europe has had something like one of history’s great miracles. Rising from the ashes to achieve history’s highest living standards ever, period…in one human lifetime. Without slavery and violence and exploitation at some kind of horrific, mass scale.

Nobody in human history ever did that. Because nobody in human history ever believed such a thing was possible. Certainly not Americans — who still don’t, even if they don’t know they don’t.

The miracle was that the most improbable thing of all turned out to be the origin of wealth. For millennia, violent men had said exploitation and enslavement were the origin of wealth. The world believed them. Bitterly, ironically, even the very societies who followed that principle then turned right around and asked, as if dumbfounded — “what’s the origin of wealth?” — while they were busy building history’s greatest slave-empires. But the true secret of wealth was revealed in the aftermath of a great war, by a desperate and broken and impoverished people, who’d spent so long killing each other, there was nothing left to destroy. There was no one left to kill. There was nothing left to kill each other for.

The only thing left was to invest in each other, to nourish each other, to grant one another inalienable and intrinsic worth, that none could ever take away. And just a few decades of that made Europe rich — while America plunged into poverty.

The lesson, to me, couldn’t shine any clearer. The origin of wealth was slavery, exploitation, hate, violence. But the origin of poverty, disgrace, and collapse was, too. The origin of truer wealth — that lasted, endured, mattered, which was made of happiness, meaning, trust, truth, peace, courage, gentleness — was people, standing beside one another, on the long, twisting, difficult road through the desert, back home. I wonder, some days, when the grief of all those lives lost pours through me, how long it will take the world to see it.

Umair Haque
February 2020

America's Future Summit: Unlocking Potential, Advancing Prosperity

Friends, 

I attended this powerful summit by the Latino Aspen Institute last week in Chicago.  

A lot of important information and perspectives were shared.  I encourage you to take some time out to listen to the different presentations focused on such topics as Latina/o entrepreneurship, wealth creation, wealth gap, community empowerment, philanthropy, and policy.

Check out more pertinent links below from CEO Abigail Golden-Vasquez, Executive Director of the Latinos and Society Program at the Aspen Institute.  Thanks, as well, to Martin Cabrera CEO and Founder of Cabrera Capital Markets (CCM), for the invitation.  Thanks to Dr. Barbara Flores, too, who allowed me to accompany her on this amazing experience.

Enjoy!

Angela Valenzuela

Dear Angela,

We want to thank you so very much for attending the America’s Future Summit: Unlocking Potential, Advancing Prosperity. We hope that the event offered a great opportunity for building networks and catalyzing potential collaborations. The conversations throughout the day aimed to deepen the national discourse on economic mobility, add nuance and richness to the discussion, and activate inspired leaders to expand opportunities for Latinos and all Americans.

The summit brought the Aspen Institute to Chicago for conversations on Latino economic advancement to some 200 participants of diverse sectors, ages, expertise and backgrounds, including yourself. With over 26 speakers in eight different sessions, the summit contributed to elevating a wide spectrum of voices on unlocking potential and advancing prosperity. The conversations in the room were taken online where #FutureofLatinos trended locally. We encourage you to share the full video of the summit here with your networks.

As we continue to focus on impact and outreach, we invite you to follow us on Twitter and visit our website for updates on our work. A white paper will be disseminated in the coming months with recommendations for expanding Latino economic mobility based on working group discussions.

Finally, if you haven’t done so already, please complete the survey for the event.

Thank you again for joining us. We hope to see you at another event soon!

Best Wishes,

The Aspen Institute Latinos and Society Program

Abigail Golden-Vazquez
The Aspen Institute
2300 N Street, NW Suite 700
Washington, DC 20037