The Chicano/a Latino/a Educational Foundation (CLEF) was Alejandro Lopez’s father’s dream, created to help disadvantaged students get resources and support to pursue higher education. His dad, Boris Lopez, started CLEF over 20 years ago with friends who were in various positions in academia, with the goal to help people reach their academic, professional, and artistic goals by providing them with tools and scholarships.
Boris was born in Guatemala and moved to Los Angeles at the young age of 10. He graduated from Alhambra High School in 1981 and realized the importance of education and the opportunities it opened up as he worked full-time while pursuing his bachelor’s degree and later graduate degrees.
“My father started this foundation with the intention of helping people who looked like him,” Alejandro shared. “When he grew up here in the 70s and 80s and 90s, it wasn’t such a nice time for people like him. He faced that discrimination like, ‘you’re not going anywhere, your job is just a painter or construction worker,’ and he said that if he’d known about things earlier, he’d wanted to have pursued something different.”
Boris ended up working in academia, in administration at Cal State Los Angeles and as an academic counselor at Los Angeles City College until his retirement in 2021. He started CLEF in 2000 and impacted thousands of students’ lives over the course of 22 years, until he passed away from leukemia in 2022 at the age of 58. Over the years, his intention moved from helping people who looked like him to helping anybody who wanted to learn.
“Even though it says ‘Chicano Latino,’ we help out everybody. We have Asian students, African-American students, Middle Eastern students who do still attend our programs and we help them get to wherever they want to go,” Lopez said.
Today, Lopez is carrying on his father’s dream and hopes to expand its impact in honor of his father’s legacy of advocating for education.
CLEF currently works with LAUSD and Birmingham Charter High School to provide workshops and a summer residential program held at University of California, Santa Barbara to introduce high school students to college life. The summer residential program, Peer Academic Leadership (PAL), helps students learn about the UC, CSU, and private universities application process and review the job application process, including resume writing and mock interviewing.
For many students, these workshops are their first introduction to the college or job application process. “Many kids don’t think about putting babysitting their siblings as a job on their resumes, but it is a job if you think about it,” Lopez said. The program staff works one-on-one with each student to develop personalized resumes and conduct mock interviews.
“Our whole goal is to present them with the information and show them about all the opportunities out there,” said Lopez. “Whatever they wish to pursue, in academia or artistically, we encourage them however we can.”
Since Lopez took over three years ago, he’s put more focus on expanding fundraising — most of their funds come through grants — in order to reach more high schools outside of LAUSD and provide more scholarships.
In addition to its high school programs, CLEF offers training for teachers, high school counselors, college counselors, and parents to better support students. It’s especially helpful for parents who haven’t gone through the American education system themselves. “We hold parent workshops to explain what their students are going through, the different ways to afford college, and we tell them about FAFSA and financial aid. We make sure they know there are ways to afford school for their kids to still go even if they’re financially restricted,” Lopez explained.
Lopez grew up witnessing the impact his father’s work had on kids and always thought he would take it over after establishing a career of his own. Now, he’s trying to learn everything about running the organization from his dad’s friends who were involved since the beginning. At the same time, he’s preparing to apply to law school after graduating from UC Berkeley in 2021 with a degree in English.
Like his father, he’s committed to opening the doors to higher education but has his own experiences to draw from. “I never liked school, it was just boring, but I think that’s just high school. It’s very different in college. You can find the specific thing you want to learn about, there’s a lot of cool things in college.”
Lopez has been hard at work spreading awareness about the foundation, including making a new website and social media pages. He’s thinking of how to grow the foundation and hopes to bring it back home and work with schools in the Alhambra Unified School District, too. Long term, he has his eyes on reaching more high schools and students beyond Los Angeles and throughout the state.Learn more about CLEF at cledfoundation.org.
