Collective Potential is Greater than Opportunity Cost
A Low Interest Loan for the Puente Human Rights Campus
Margi lives in Colorado, she discovered RG a year ago and attended the 2013 MMMC. Margi works as an environmental educator, and her focus on education access stems from an overarching desire to align her money with her values.
As a young person with access to wealth and class privilege I consider migrant justice one of the most direct areas where I can leverage my privileges to directly increase equity. Now is a particularly exciting time to be involved with migrant justice because it is at the forefront of advancing civil rights in the US. My interest was sparked last fall when my students in Colorado were applying to college and encountered barriers because they didn’t have papers, even though their families came to the US from Mexico before they can remember. Like the 1.4 million other DREAMers who have attended school in the US their whole lives, my students are being systematically denied access to higher education because they aren’t citizens of the US. For example, my students were given misinformation about federal financial aid from college counselors and they weren’t able to fill out some college’s online applications without social security numbers. My students were aware of DACA[1] but didn’t know that last summer our state also passed instate tuition for undocumented childhood arrivals. I committed to financially supporting my students’ access to higher education by seeking out ways to understand and address our broken immigration system in a larger context. This year I have donated a total of $20,000 to support migrant justice at local, state, and national scales.
