Since it started at NC State, the Juntos program has grown quickly. Its goal is to help Latinx kids do well in school all through high school. Recently, the program has grown in terms of both the number of participants and the number of sites across the country.
At first, there were four parts to the program: family involvement, 4-H clubs, success coaching, and summer activities. Juntos’ senior director, Diana Urieta, said that the program will be able to add a fifth part thanks to new funds.
Urieta said, “We got a $7.8 million grant from the USDA [National Institute of Food and Agriculture] that will let us add a fifth part to Juntos. It will be called “Career Pathways,” which is Spanish for “roads to careers.”
Urieta said that this part will begin with career paths in agroscience and then move on to other options. This will help students learn about different jobs that they might not have known about otherwise.
Urieta said, “There’s so much tech.” “I had no idea an engineer could work in agroscience.” We don’t always know what’s going on in our careers because there’s so much to learn. This gives us a chance to create a part that really connects with job paths.
We are now in 15 states with the Juntos program as of 2021.
United States now has a Juntos Consortium, Urieta said. You can join the Consortium, which is made up of leaders who want to make sure that their Juntos program in their state is successful and then really push the work forward at the national level. Other land grant universities and organizations are joining as well.
Urieta, who went to NC State herself, said she was glad to see the school doing well.
“I’m just so proud that this program was started at NC State and that the chief academic officer and college dean now work in the Division of Academic and Student Affairs,” Urieta said. “I think this program has been well supported and led so that it can grow and help more people.”
Xiomara Alcantara-Ocampo, a work-study and fourth-year social work student, said that she has seen the program grow in her community while she has been involved.
“When I was in school, Junios was only in high schools,” Alcantara-Ocampo said. “They are now in middle school and will soon be at community college.” I think there were no more than 80 kids at the summer camp before. In the summer before, there were more than 100.
Alcantara-Ocampo said that her friendships with these students helped her figure out what she wanted to study. This was possible because the school was getting more people involved.
She said, “When I first got here, my major was biology, but I wanted to go in a totally different direction.” “When I thought about it, I had been doing all the things I enjoy all year, like working with families and kids, and then I worked at summer camp, and that’s when things really changed for me.”
Erik Modesto-Reyes, who is in his fourth year and is studying electrical and computer engineering, said that he hopes the school will keep going in the same direction.
“Seeing how it’s changing lives across the country is pretty cool,” Modesto-Reyes said. “They all have the same drive from a K–12 point of view.” “I really hope it keeps getting bigger over time.”
To help the younger students do well in the future, Modesto-Reyes said he wants the school to reach out to alumni who have been through similar things.
“Know people who have had great success or a beautiful story to tell, whether it’s about failure or success and how they turned it around to be an example for younger people, telling them, ‘We went through the same thing you guys did,'” Modesto-Reyes said.
Modesto-Reyes said that he really wants to give back to the school because it helped him do so much.
“Back in the early 2000s, the main reason Junitos was made was to take advantage of those chances,” Modesto-Reyes said. “Now, 17 years later, we’re becoming a big program.” “That means a lot more kids can get to it, and we hope to be able to increase that number in the next few years as well and give back.”
As a former Juntos student who also did work-study, Modesto-Reyes uses his own experience to help younger students in the program do well in school and eventually get jobs.
“Now that I’m in college, I want to let younger people and parents know about different opportunities. Parents are the ones who look out for their kids.” “They want to give us chances.”