Week 5

My first real business trip!

I went down to North Carolina to UNC chapel hill where the original chapter of SLI is!  First off UNC’s campus is BEAUTIFUL!  Not as beautiful as UR’s of course, but still pretty impressive.  I stayed there for two days Friday and Saturday.  During those two days I got to meet Ricky, who is the head of SLI and he’s one of Forbes 30 under 30 and he’s overseeing NC SLI’s transition into an advocacy group.  There’s some drama about that which I can’t repeat, but it’s juicy.  I brought down about fifty pounds worth of camera equipment to film interviews with some of SLI’s alumni.

It was fantastic meeting some of the Alumni many of whom are very accomplished in their fields.  Six alumni in three groups, nine straight hours of filming.  I ended up talking with most of them for over an hour.  They were all very well spoken and passionate people.  Super J is two Latinas who were a mentor mentee pari and are still friends to this day.  Emilio is currently an immigration activist, his work includes the Dreamers D.C. march, as well as running for UNC president and starting a group advocating for fair tuition in schools.  It was great to talk to all of them.  They all hard words of praise for Dr. Kaufman, and many came back to contribute to SLI in their own ways.  Which shows the lasting impact SLI had on them.  It was really great getting to meet everyone.

I was able to get a good look on how SLI really started.  Dr. Kaufman is a tour de force.  I’m really glad I had the freedom and flexibility to come down to UNC and meet all the alumni and faculty.  I imagine any other organization would have cut the idea at the roots but Dr. Kaufman was very open and enthusiastic about it which was great.

Now I have six hours of footage to edit.

Other notes, I talked to kaufman and michele about the proper use of Latinx as well as Alumni/ae/a/us