Founded in 1999, the Association of Latino Alumni (ALA) facilitates and promotes the interests of Latino alumni from across the University. Through ALA, Latino Alumni can avail themselves of all of Penn resources for a lifetime of education, enrichment, and a reconnection with one another, all levels of the Latino Penn community, and the University as a whole. ALA is the first alumni group to schedule Alumni Office Hours in its partnering student cultural resource center, La Casa Latina: Center for Hispanic Excellence.
For the next couple of years, ALA will focus on three goals: student retention, faculty engagement and membership building.
Student retention involves financial aid, student life, mentoring and advising, among other things, and ALA will strive to ensure that all Latino students that enter Penn take advantage of all the resources available in order to focus on their studies and graduate without having to overcome major hardships of any sort.
Faculty engagement involves increasing the number of Latino minority professors at Penn, an issue dear to many of us and soon to become a priority at the university.
Membership building means reaching out to and engaging Latino alumni, both recent and pre-1980's, before applicants where asked to check a box indicating their ethnic background. ALA has many outstanding alumni, but many don't know that we exist or what we do.
