LEAGUE OF UNITED LATIN AMERICAN CITIZENS
LULAC Council 1057 is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to advancing the education of Hispanic and disadvantaged youth in Southern Arizona. LULAC works well with both businesses and government to initiate educational programs in Arizona.
LULAC Youth Leadership Conference
History: The League of United Latin American Youth Leadership
Conference was instituted in 1988 in response to concerns about the state
of education and lack of programs that promoted and developed leadership in
young people attending middle and high school. It was believed that schools
needed community involvement to assist with these key issues and with the
cooperation and involvement of our public, private and charter schools and
institutions of higher learning, a nationally recognized program was born to
assist students with a program that would offer resources, mentoring and
leadership skills to help our youth and young adults remain in school, graduate
and further their education. It was
important that students who attend the
conference be exposed to an institution of higher education thus the setting for
the conference at Pima Community College’s West Campus.
During its inaugural year, the conference was a one-day program that reached
more than 900 youth; a number surpassed each year to the current attendance
sixteen years later of 5,000 youth in an expanded two-day program; one
day for middle schools and the other for high schools.
As important as the development of the LULAC Youth Leadership Conference was for
the State of Arizona, so was the formulation of the LULAC Educator’s Banquet, an
opportunity to not only celebrate the accomplishments of the LULAC Youth
Leadership Conference, but to also encourage the community to assist and be a
part of contributing to our children’s future via a scholarship fund which to
date has provided more than half a million dollars in scholarships.