This year’s Youth Corridor had the mission of expressing and promoting all the services that are directed towards Humboldt Park’s youth development and educational services. The National Boricua Human Rights was well represented by Alyssa Villegas and Matt McCanna who, among many other tasks, were in charge of collecting petitions, distributing flyers, and educating the public on Oscar López Rivera. In total, more than 900 petitions and over $600 were collected in our “jail challenge”, where the audience had the chance to experiment what it was like to be inside a prison cell and collect $33, representing the 33 years of Oscar’s imprisonment, in order to be released.
The BACCA program was also represented by youth leaders Michelle Guzmán and Mia Espinosa, who raised more than $130 in water bottles for our anti-underage drinking campaign under the leadership of Program Coordinator María Borrero. The Union for Puerto Rican Students (UPRS) was also present with the new UIC Chapter President Ian Torres and Que Ondee Sola’s Editor in Chief Alyssa Villegas and NEIU’s chapter member Rebecca Ríos. A gentrification model designed by UIC’s architecture student Joel Aguilera and Gustavo Varela from Generation L was one of the main attractions, since it showed an artistic reflection of our community’s struggle to maintain all the amazing Latino services and resources that we offer.
The University of Illinois at Chicago brought representatives from the Latino Cultural Center and the LARES program, making the youth corridor an amazing arrange of educational and artistic presentations. In total, the Youth Corridor raised more than $1,500! All these efforts were a success thanks to the collaboration of the leaders mentioned above, who feel a strong commitment to our community’s future.
