By Mailan Nguyen
Circulation Editor
The Latino Scholars Union Club has been planning their first major project which will be to provide children and low-income families in Mexico with hearing aids through the CORAL organization.
The LSU club first started in the middle of the 2015-2016 school year, although there was not much activity and participation from the students of Costa, LSU co vice president Andrea Saulceda says. It started out by having 6 members to now around 80.
“I wanted to help start this club to bring awareness to minorities and give the students at this school a place where they can share their interests and make them feel welcome as well as encouraging them to invest their time for good causes and projects,” said Saulceda.
Photos: Latino Scholars Union club meeting
So far, the Latino Scholars Union has held Mira Costa’s first national hispanic heritage month assembly. They managed to bring a Hispanic-American engineer and former NASA astronaut, John Daniel Olivas in as a guest speaker to attempt at bringing new and more interests into Costa, Saulceda says.
Link: Learn more about the former NASA astronaut, John Olivas.
“I think this project is a wonderful opportunity for us to give back to our brothers and sisters in Mexico who are less fortunate. It’s also a cool opportunity for us to possibly collaborate with the ASL club and connect with the deaf and hard-of-hearing community,” said LSU president Natalie Mejia.
LSU will raise money through fundraisers such as selling food on club day and having bake sales. The money will then be donated to CORAL, a non-profit center in Oaxaca that provides deaf and hearing impaired low-income families and children with hearing aids.
Link: Learn more about what the CORAL non-profit center does and how it started.
“Something that I want to accomplish by doing this is the satisfaction of helping others,” LSU club member Carlos Lopez said. “I want others to know that helping other people isn’t very hard. You don’t need to do a great thing to help someone in a great way.”
Video: Latino Scholars Union video project discussing the CORAL Organization project
The CORAL center was created in 1999 by Oregon couple, Dr. Richard Carroll and Nancy Press. While in Mexico, they noticed a major hindrance in the Hispanic communities, which was deafness and hearing loss in a number of children that was not being treated.
“The club is an open environment for everyone,” Saulceda said. “We don’t care if you are Hispanic or not because at the end of the day we have something in common with everyone. We may not be a majority at Costa but that’s exactly why we have the club. LSU is a great club and I hope that in the future it will grow and thrive on campus.”
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