ASPIRA – Once an Aspirante, always an Aspirante.

It is with great sorrow that we announce that Luis Alvarez, who championed ASPIRA all of his life and dedicated years to the organization since starting at ASPIRA of New York in 1967, passed away peacefully in New York City last week.
Luis started at ASPIRA of New York, operating programs. When Louis Nunez moved to the newly formed ASPIRA of America in 1968 to become its first National Executive Director, Luis followed to serve as Assistant Director. During the next few years, Luis...

The Open Society Foundations has issued a Call for Applications for a new youth fellowship program designed to help develop a new generation of leaders for Puerto Rico, which was devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017. Through the new Puerto Rico Youth...

Mirta Ramirez was one of the founders of ASPIRA of Illinois, a nonprofit organization that has been devoted to the education and leadership development of Latino youth for the last fifty years.
Mirta’s vision to expand the ASPIRA model to Chicago, when the high school dropout rate was seventy-five percent, served as a catalyst for others to organize and to advocate for Puerto Rican and other Latino youth. In 1968, with absolute resolve and...

ASPIRA strongly opposes any policy that promotes the separation of families and the dehumanization of children. Since the start of the zero-tolerance immigration policy, more than 2,500 children have been separated from their families.
These children are being held in dismal conditions, without knowing when they will see their parents again. This trauma inherently violates Article 5 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “No one shall be subjected to torture...