The Aspen Institute

Estefanía Pérez-Luna is an emerging bilingual health professional with a dedication towards marginalized communities of color. Most of her community involvement has been around the undocumented community. While an undergraduate student, she partook in a collaborative effort leading a protest against the building of a for-profit immigrant detention center in Joliet, IL. Seeing the lack of peer mentorship as a first-generation student, she has held scholarship workshops and has continued to mentor and guide her peers in applying for college, internships, and other opportunities in efforts to create collaborative and supportive spaces among Latinx students. Later, she was selected to be part of the Medicina Scholars program at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she learned about how socio-economic factors impact the health of underserved communities. It is there she became interested in the practice of medicine with a public health and social justice lens. In 2014, she was selected as the recipient of the Dr. Juan Andrade Jr. Scholarship for Young Hispanic Leaders and has gone to receive other awards for her leadership. This past year, she became the first undocumented person to serve in Public Allies. She continues her AmeriCorps service at Thrive Chicago, a collective impact organization focusing on disconnected youth. There, she works on various data-related projects including the Thrive Data Partnership, an unprecedented initiative linking youth serving nonprofits to school academic data to improve youth services for Chicago Public School students. Upon the completion of her service with AmeriCorps, she hopes to apply for Medical school to continue her aspirations of serving Latinx communities by advocating for the health of her future patients.  Participated in the Aspen Forum for Community Solutions.