On Saturday, March 30th, FLX Live in downtown Geneva hosted a fundraiser for Adelante Student Voices. Adelante was founded in 2015 by Gabriela Quintanilla to provide a space and an opportunity for undocumented students, especially those in rural areas, to gather and to share resources on their legal status and options for the future. Quintanilla based the program on her own experience as an undocumented high school student figuring out her own route to college.
“I pretty much collected all of the resources that I had gone through in high school and put it together into a seven day summer program, which now has evolved to a 10 day, to now accepting 20 students instead of 12 how we started. Now we have mentors for these students and we meet every three months and we also take our students on different college trips and activism activities as well.”
Much of the attention over undocumented young people has focused on those participating in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program known as DACA. While the Trump administration’s decision to end that program has been held up in the courts, many of the Adelante students are not eligible for the program. Regardless of the outcome for the DREAMers, Adelante works to support some of the thousands of undocumented students who graduate from US high schools each year.
“We'll keep pushing and we will keep advocating for those that we work with and we'll keep providing resources for our students. Part of what we do in our program is also that we learn about the different laws in place that perhaps any of them could qualify. So we bring a lawyer and to sort of do a screening for them and in a workshop so they learn their options.”
The fundraiser at FLX Live raised money for scholarships for graduates of the Adelante program. The event featured Danielle Ponder and the Tomorrow People along with the Cool Club and Lipker Sisters.
