Civic Night 2023

Our first civic night in person since 2019 was a tremendous success. We welcomed our graduating seniors, incoming juniors, teachers, supporters, and friends with empanadas for dinner before our evening's program began. 

We first heard from two civics group working on education access. The first group focused on the lack of extracurricular opportunities for low-income students in New York City, especially college access programming. For their project, they created an opportunities list, map, and podcast. They called the audience to action by asking everyone to share the list with their high school counselor, and add resources they've used to the list.

Our second group also worked on education access, though their call to action focused on the lack of funding for summer programming, specifically, the city's Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP). They invited everyone to sign their petition to expand SYEP to more students and to include educational programs (like Freedom and Citizenship). 

Our third group worked on school gun violence, a topic that was especially meaningful to students in the group who attend University Heights High School, where a classmate was killed last year. The group prepared a gun violence teach-in at University Heights and called on the audience to do the same. 

After our civic presentations, Dr. Lee awarded the first Jon Carlo Dominguez Award in honor of our former Teaching Assistant who died in March. The award went to Shantal Ramos Bueno, a first generation college-bound student from the Bronx. We encourage you to contribute to this or future year's awards by giving to the Freedom and Citizenship Fund in Jon Carlo's memory.

Professor Montás concluded the program after thanking our undergraduate and graduate student staff. He reminded our students that this is just the beginning of their intellectual journey, and invited them to return to next year's alumni reunion and tell us all about what comes next.