Leslie Velasquez, a senior health promotion major at the University of Georgia, has left her mark on the fight for education success in the Athens Latino community. As an undergraduate assistant for the Center for Latino Achievement & Success in Education, Velasquez brings light to Hispanic culture, influential figures and professional development.
As an assistant, Velasquez is responsible for the center’s social media and platform management.
“I am very interested in health disparities within the Hispanic community,” Velasquez said. “I feel like working in this type of environment has allowed me to become more familiar with other disparities that the Latino community faces.”
With a personal motivation to help the community, Velasquez also volunteers with Oasis Counseling Center and La Clínica LaK’ech to provide free mental health services to the Latino community. She is concerned about the lack of overall support for the community and how many programs fail to take into account the language and financial barriers that members of the Latino community face.
Through her work with CLASE, she can highlight these challenges through social media, an inexpensive and accessible source of communication.
Velasquez is pursuing a master’s degree in public health in epidemiology to track disease patterns and risk factors, bringing that information back into the Hispanic community to help address health disparities. Velasquez hopes to provide this information available in Spanish so that all members of the community can understand.
“Leslie is a a young Latina woman who brings to the table things that I don’t have, and that matters,” Dr. Paula Mellom, interim director of CLASE, said.
Velasquez offers CLASE a fresh and firsthand perspective of what the young Latino community needs, especially when it comes to education and social media.
She has worked on various ideas for the social media accounts, including series such as “Fiesta Friday” and “Latinos Who Inspire the World.” Through “Fiesta Friday,” Velasquez informs about different aspects of Latin culture, such as food, like ceviche and sancocho, and dances and festivals, like tango, merengue and Feria de las Flores.
Not only does the social media account inform others of Latin culture, it also provides logistical information, such as events, CLASE office hours and available scholarships.
Jean Costa-Silva, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics and Velasquez’s coworker at CLASE, raved about working with Leslie and how easily they are able to bounce ideas off each other.
“It’s so good to work with a person that is nice to you [and] honest about what they like and what they don’t from the get go,” Costa-Silva said. “[Leslie] is very genuine.”
Velasquez is also concerned with the difficulties that hispanic students face in school. She said this includes the lack of representation in gifted classes, the lack of knowledge many Latino students face as first-generation college students and the barriers that exist in established resources that fail to help the community the way it needs to be helped.
During the summer, she worked on a campaign to bring awareness to American laws and policies regarding Latinos. As a result of this project, Velasquez received feedback from people interested in some of the topics they did not know before. This fall, she brought attention to Hispanic Heritage Month, which ran from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15, by making posts highlighting the influential figures who had made an impact on the CLASE team.
Velasquez’s work contributes to spreading the message of CLASE and the Latino culture, providing educators with quick and visually appealing information for better access to whatever resource they may need.