Hey all! My name is Wendy Hernandez and I am a junior at UC Berkeley majoring in American Studies with a concentration in Education Policy and Society. I am currently working on restructuring the "Willard Project", a yearlong outreach hosted by Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority, Inc (LTA) for 7th and 8th grade AVID students at Willard Middle School. The AVID staff at Willard and LTA have established a partnership that will continue to bring awareness to the middle school students on social injustices that negatively affect their chances of attending college.
The sisters of LTA at UC Berkeley understand the disproportionate amount of Black and Latino prisoners who come from neighborhoods that do not produce high rates of college bound students. These neighborhoods, similar to the ones many sisters grew up in, often do not provide students with resources to become academically competitive students. Instead, they are infested with opportunities for our youth to be targeted by the police and quickly become involved with the criminal justice system. The disproportionate amount of Black and Latinos that are being suspended from schools also affect students negatively and discourage them from pursuing education as a means of success. With our commitment to establishing meaningful and lasting relationships with our AVID students, we aim to play a role in diminishing the amount of Black and Latino youth incarceration rates and increase the number of them in higher institutions of education.
We will be doing our first outreach in late January/early February, so be on the look out for updates on how these outreaches go! For now, enjoy the video on this link if you are not familiar with the school-prison-pipeline. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWDB5uRW6p8
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