Since the Juntos program, designed to support the academic success of Latinx students throughout high school, began at NC State, it has expanded rapidly. Recently, the program has seen an increase in both participants and locations across the country.
The program initially had four components: family engagement, 4-H clubs, success coaching and summer programming. Diana Urieta, the senior director of Juntos, said new funding will enable the program to add a fifth component.
“We received a $7.8 million grant from USDA [National Institute of Food and Agriculture] that’s going to allow us to create a fifth component to Juntos, which is ‘Career Pathways,’ or ‘caminos a carreras’ in Spanish,” Urieta said.
Urieta said this component will start with pathways in agroscience and expand into other career possibilities, helping expose students to various careers that they may otherwise be unaware of.
“There’s so much technology,” Urieta said. “I didn’t know that an engineer could be in agroscience. There’s so much within a career pathway that sometimes we don’t know. So we have an opportunity to build a component that really engages with career pathways.”
As of 2021, the Juntos program is in 15 states.
“We now have a national Juntos Consortium,” Urieta said. “We have other land grant universities and organizations that are joining — there’s a membership to join the Consortium — that is made up of leaders who are focused on really making sure that their Juntos program in their state is successful and then really pushing forward the work at a national level.”
As an NC State alumni herself, Urieta said she’s happy to see the program thriving.
“I’m just super proud of the fact that this program was founded at NC State, that the leadership, like the chancellor and the dean of the college, now sit at the Division of Academic and Student Affairs,” Urieta said. “I really feel like there’s been good support and leadership for this program to be able to grow and expand.”
Xiomara Alcantara-Ocampo, a fourth-year studying social work and work-study student, said that she’s personally seen the program grow at a local level during her involvement.
“When I was a student, [Juntos] only was in high schools,” Alcantara-Ocampo said. “Now they’re in middle schools, and they’re going into community colleges. Even at the summer camp before, it would be, max, I think, 80 kids. Last summer, they had over 100 students there.”
Alcantara-Ocampo said her relationship with these students helped her discover what she wanted to study, which was made possible by the increasing number of participants in the program.
“When I first got here, my major was biology, and I wanted to go a completely different route,” Alcantara-Ocampo said. “Then I realized I had been doing all the stuff I like to do all year long — like working with families, with students and then I worked the summer camp, and that’s what really made my switch flip.”
Erik Modesto-Reyes, a fourth-year studying electrical and computer engineering, said he hopes to see the program continue on its current trajectory.
“It’s pretty cool, just seeing the impact it’s having for people around the country, and they share the same drive, from the K-12 perspective,” Modesto-Reyes said. “Hopefully it keeps on growing as the years go by.”
For the future, Modesto-Reyes said he wants the program to reach out to alumni that have shared experiences with the younger students to facilitate their success.
“People that you know have very successful stories, or have a beautiful story to tell, whether it’s success or failure and turning that into success, just being a shared of case to the younger generation, telling them ‘we went through exactly what you guys went through,” Modesto-Reyes said.
Modesto-Reyes said he’s passionate about giving back to the program because of what it helped him accomplish.
“The main reason [Juntos] was created was to be able to pursue those opportunities back in the early 2000s and now,17 years later, we’re becoming a big program,” Modesto-Reyes said. “So a lot more kids have that accessibility, and hopefully we can grow those numbers in the next few years as well and give back.”
As a work-study student and Juntos alum, Modesto-Reyes uses his personal experience to support the academic — and eventual career — success of younger students in the program.
“What I’m trying to do now as a college student, is telling the younger people, ‘Hey, you know, there’s different opportunities,’ and telling the parents as well, because parents are the ones that are looking out for their kids. They want to give us opportunities.”
The program can be contacted via email at [email protected].
