About Us:

We Are Catalysts for Social Change

We are a group of educators who worked in a neighborhood school in an area with many first-generation immigrants. We were outraged as we watched many of the students we had come to know and love—who had such potential—lose their home languages and cultural identities and find a new identity in local gangs.Â

We felt compelled to offer these students the opportunity to preserve their rich linguistic and cultural heritage and discover a credible alternative to gang involvement. We wanted to create a place where they could identify with a group, be respected in a position of power for all the right reasons, and learn about the benefits of hard work over time.

So we developed our model program, the Heritage Language Literacy Club, which has now been successfully serving Latino students for more than nine years. We learned a great deal about program development, funding sources, and working with disadvantaged youth, and were able to help thousands of students—but we didn’t stop there. We wanted to make these critical services available to minority students everywhere, so we founded Prospera Initiatives, Inc, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, to share this powerful model with schools and communities across the country

Our leadership team is now joined in this work by community members in the fields of business, healthcare, finance, and government who recognize the value of bilingual and biliterate employees and understand the importance of starting early to cultivate these future leaders.