My father taught me leadership without ever using the word. He came to this country from the Dominican Republic with almost nothing, and one of the first things he did was save up for a pair of loafers, not out of vanity, but because he understood that how he presented himself could be the difference between being seen as capable or being dismissed before he even spoke. That small act told me everything about how he moved through the world: quietly, deliberately, and always thinking several steps ahead for the people who depended on him. He worked jobs that asked more of his body and time than they ever gave back in recognition, and he did it for years with the singular goal of buying our family's first house. I watched him treat that goal not as a personal milestone but as a foundation he was building for all of us, something that would outlast him and give the rest of us a starting point he never had. That is the version of leadership I grew up watching: not authority or recognition, but the willingness to carry weight quietly so that other people's paths could be a little easier. What I learned from him wasn't a lesson he sat me down to teach. It was something I absorbed from watching him translate his own hardship into protection for the people around him, and from noticing how he never let his own struggles make him smaller toward others. He was the kind of person neighbors came to for help filling out paperwork, or for a ride, or just for someone to talk to. He gave in the ways he could, even when he had little to spare, and he never treated that generosity as optional. As a first-generation student, I carry that same instinct into how I try to lead. At Fordham, I'm serving now as Vice President of the Model United Nations team, which has meant showing up not just to represent our school, but to make sure newer members, many of whom are also first-generation or unfamiliar with these spaces, feel like they belong in the room. This past summer, I carried that same value into my work as a Hope Reichbach Fund Fellow at Brooklyn Defender Services, where I worked across criminal, immigration, and family defense practice areas. Every case reminded me that behind every file is someone like my father: someone trying to build something better for the people they love, often while navigating systems that were not built with them in mind. My father never had someone to advocate for him the way I now hope to advocate for others. That gap is what motivates me toward public defense and immigrant rights work specifically. I want to be the kind of presence in someone else's life that he has been in mine: steady, unglamorous, and entirely focused on making sure the people around him have a fairer shot than the one they were given. This scholarship would help me keep building toward that future without asking my family to sacrifice more than they already have. It would let me say yes to the next fellowship, the next unpaid opportunity that builds real skill, without treating financial strain as the cost of doing meaningful work. My father built a house so our family would have a foundation. I'm trying to build a career that gives that same foundation to people who have never had one.

I grew up in the Bronx watching my parents work jobs that never seemed to match how hard they worked. My father came from the Dominican Republic with a pair of loafers he'd saved months for, believing that looking put-together was the closest thing to armor he could afford in a country that didn't always see him as he was. I learned early that appearance and reality rarely lined up for people like us, and that the gap between them was where most of our family's struggle lived. As a first-generation student, I didn't have anyone at home who could walk me through the college process. I filled out FAFSA forms at the kitchen table while translating financial aid letters into Spanish for my parents, who worked long hours to keep my three siblings and I, afloat. Being bilingual in English and Spanish wasn't just a skill I built for myself, it became a tool I used constantly to bridge my family into systems that were never designed with us in mind. The obstacle that shaped me most wasn't a single event but a pattern: watching people who looked like my father get treated as suspects before they were ever given the benefit of the doubt. When I was old enough to understand the Central Park Five case, I saw my father's loafers differently. I understood that respectability was never going to be enough protection, and that the system itself needed people willing to stand inside it and fight for fairness from within. That recognition is what pulled me toward law. At Fordham, I am pursuing a Political Science and International Studies double major on a pre-law track, and this past summer I was one of five students selected for the Hope Reichbach Fund Fellowship at Brooklyn Defender Services, where I worked across criminal, immigration, and family defense practice areas. I've also spent time at Lincoln Square Legal Services, sitting with the same neighborhoods and public spaces that shaped my own upbringing, now from the other side of the table, trying to make sure people get real representation instead of assumptions made about them. None of this has been financially easy. Every unpaid fellowship, every semester of tuition, every application fee has meant asking my family to stretch further, or finding ways to stretch further myself. What keeps me going is knowing that the work is not abstract to me. Immigrant rights, housing equity, and civil rights are not policy topics I picked up in a classroom, they are the conditions my own family has lived through. This scholarship would let me keep saying yes to the fellowships, internships, and coursework that are building me into the public defender I want to become, without having to weigh that growth against my family's financial survival. It would be an investment in someone who already knows exactly what he's working for.

My father left Santo Domingo with nothing but the belief that his children deserved more than poverty had given him. He dropped out of school in the sixth grade to care for his sick mother, immigrated to a country where he knew no one, and built a life in the Bronx as a superintendent. My mother works two jobs to keep us housed. Neither of them ever went to college. I am the first. That history is not background. It is purpose. I have watched my family navigate housing insecurity, language barriers, and legal systems that were never designed to protect people like us. When we nearly lost our apartment because of a landlord who exploited a technicality in my mother's Section 8 payments, I felt the absence of someone who knew how to fight back. I decided to become that person. I am now a rising junior at Fordham University double-majoring in Political Science and International Studies on a pre-law track, carrying a 3.632 GPA. This summer I was selected as one of five Hope Reichbach Fund Fellows at Brooklyn Defender Services, working alongside public defenders in criminal, immigration, and family defense practice. Every client I sit across from reminds me why I am here. My goal is to become a public defender in the Bronx and eventually a policymaker who addresses the conditions that bring people into courtrooms in the first place. My father's sacrifice made my education possible. My community's need made my purpose clear.

Higher education is not a luxury for me. It is the mechanism through which everything I am working toward becomes possible. Growing up in the Bronx as the child of Dominican immigrants, raised by a mother who works two jobs to keep a roof over our heads, I learned early that the systems meant to protect families like mine often fail them instead. When we nearly lost our apartment, I did not just feel the fear of displacement. I felt the absence of someone who knew how to fight back. Growing up queer in a community where that identity is not always welcomed added another layer to that feeling, the sense of navigating a world that was not fully built for you, and learning to move through it anyway. I want to be that person who fights back. For my family, for my community, and for everyone who has ever felt like the system was not built with them in mind. I am a gay, Afro-Latino, first-generation college student from the Bronx, the son of a Dominican immigrant who dropped out of school in the sixth grade and built a life in this country through sheer will. My mother works two jobs. We nearly lost our apartment because her landlord deliberately structured her Section 8 payments to arrive the day after rent was due, then weaponized that technicality against her. She was paying. He was scamming. And she almost lost everything because she did not have anyone in her corner who understood how to fight back. That experience is not unique to my family. It is the daily reality for countless people across the Bronx, and it is exactly the kind of injustice I have committed my education to addressing. I am currently a rising junior at Fordham University double-majoring in Political Science and International Studies on a pre-law track, carrying a 3.632 GPA. This summer, I was selected as one of five Hope Reichbach Fund Fellows at Brooklyn Defender Services, where I work alongside public defenders in criminal, immigration, and family defense practice. I have watched clients walk into intake interviews carrying criminal charges, immigration holds, and family separation proceedings all at once, three crises converging on one person who deserves competent, compassionate representation. Before this fellowship, I spent over a year at Lincoln Square Legal Services supporting attorneys with research, case preparation, and client advocacy. I have also served as a Campaign Fellow in the Office of the Brooklyn Borough President and returned to the Defying Legal Gravity Legal Empowerment Fellowship as an alumni panelist, co-moderating alongside nonprofit directors at Fordham Law School for the next generation of students who look like me. Being queer, low-income, and the child of immigrants means I have never had the luxury of taking my place in any room for granted. Every opportunity has required proving I belong, often in spaces that were not designed with people like me in mind. That pressure could have broken me. Instead it clarified me. I know exactly why I am doing this, and I know exactly who I am doing it for. My goal is to become a public defender in the Bronx and eventually a policymaker who addresses the root conditions that bring people into courtrooms in the first place. Criminal law, immigrant rights, housing equity, and LGBTQ+ protections are not abstract areas of interest. They are the daily reality of people I love. The positive impact I plan to create is concrete: more people with access to quality legal representation, fewer families facing eviction without counsel, and policy that reflects the lived experience of low-income and marginalized communities rather than talking around it. Financial pressure is real and constant. This scholarship would help ensure that the cost of my education does not become the reason I fall short of what I have committed to building. I am not just pursuing a degree. I am pursuing the ability to walk back into the Bronx with the tools to change what I grew up seeing.

I am studying Political Science and International Studies at Fordham University on a pre-law track, with the goal of becoming a public defender and policymaker. I chose this path because I have spent my entire life watching systems fail the people I love, and I want to spend my career building something better. But before I could fight for anyone else, I had to learn how to fight for myself. I grew up hearing the word "maricón." In Dominican culture, it gets thrown around casually; at the television, across the dinner table, between relatives who do not pause to consider who might be sitting in the room absorbing it. I was that person in the room. I heard it from people who loved me, people who would have said they would do anything for me, people who did not yet know that the word they were using so carelessly was a word for me. That is what it means to grow up gay and Dominican. You learn very early that love can be real and conditional at the same time. In Latino spaces, queerness is often treated as something to be silent about, not acknowledged, not celebrated, and not welcomed at the family table without conditions. I grew up watching friends get pushed out of their homes for who they were. I loved my culture deeply and felt, at times, that my culture could not fully love me back. What made it harder was that queer spaces did not always feel like home either. I was too Dominican for some rooms and too queer for others, existing in a gap between identities that neither fully claimed me. That tension did not break me. It clarified me. Being gay and Afro-Latino taught me what it means to live in multiple worlds simultaneously, to find belonging where it is not automatically offered. Those are skills I bring into every room where I advocate for people who have also been told they do not belong. I do see myself as someone who gives back to the LGBTQ+ community. I am building toward a legal and policy career that centers the most marginalized, including queer people of color who face compounded systems of exclusion. I am working toward a future where queer Dominicans do not have to choose between their cultural identity and their full selves; by being visible, staying in these spaces, and refusing to disappear. Financially, this scholarship would make a direct difference. I am a low-income, first-generation college student whose mother works two jobs as a single parent to support three children in the Bronx. Last year, my family nearly faced eviction. I contribute income from my own part-time job to help keep our household stable. Every dollar I do not spend on tuition is a dollar that does not force me to choose between survival and the future I am building. The Star Farm Scholarship would not just support my education. It would support the version of me trying to make sure that the next gay Dominican kid from the Bronx does not have to fight as hard just to be seen. That is the community I came from. That is the community I am going back to. And I intend to make sure it is more whole when I arrive than it was when I left.

When my father left Santo Domingo, he left everything he knew. The language, the streets, the people who loved him. He came to America with nothing but the belief that his children deserved something more than what poverty had given him. He built a life in the Bronx as a superintendent, raised four kids, and never finished his own education past the sixth grade. He never got to be a college graduate. That distinction will belong to me. Being a first-generation college graduate will mean that the sacrifice ends here. Not in the sense that struggle disappears, but in the sense that a new baseline is set. My brothers did not pursue higher education. I carry the weight of that too; the awareness that this path is fragile, that it requires fight, and that it is not guaranteed to anyone who looks like me or comes from where I come from. When I walk across that stage, I will not just be receiving a degree. I will be closing a chapter that my father opened when he stepped off a plane into a country that did not welcome him, and proving that his gamble was worth it. But a degree alone is not what shapes a person. It is what you do with the time around it. My extracurricular life has been the education I could not get in a classroom. At Lincoln Square Legal Services, I have sat across from clients facing eviction, helped prepare legal documents, and watched what it looks like when someone fights for a person the system has already written off. That work has humbled me and sharpened me in equal measure. It has shown me that public service is not abstract. It is a specific person in a specific crisis who needs someone present and capable. Through Defying Legal Gravity's Legal Empowerment Fellowship, I was given access to first-year law school curriculum as a high schooler and returned as an alumni panelist at their 2025 Legal Empowerment Conference, co-moderating a panel alongside nonprofit directors who had spent years building organizations across New York City. That experience taught me that leadership is not about seniority. It is about showing up and being willing to use whatever you have learned in service of others. Canvassing Brooklyn neighborhoods as a Campaign Fellow for Antonio Reynoso's congressional campaign taught me how to meet people where they are; how to have conversations about power and participation with people who have been told their voices do not matter. Y-Vote taught me that civic engagement is an act of resistance for communities like mine. Model UN taught me diplomacy, the art of holding your position while genuinely listening to someone who disagrees. Each of these experiences has built something in me that no tuition payment can purchase: clarity of purpose. I know why I am in school. I know who I am doing it for. I know what I want to build when I am done. Being a first-generation college graduate will mean that education is no longer foreign territory in my family. It will mean that when my siblings have children, those children will grow up knowing that college is not someone else's world. It will mean that the Bronx kid whose father collected coins in a wooden money bank to survive is now a lawyer, a policymaker, a person with the tools to fight for everyone who never got that chance. That is what this degree will mean to me. Not a credential. A continuation.