Inspiring pride and confidence
Helping low-income students to become their best selves while they give back to their community and help the homeless
Inspiring pride and confidence
Helping low-income students to become their best selves while they give back to their community and help the homeless
“To give someone a sense of pride or ownership helps them become better.”
Miriam Alejandro’s drive to help others was inspired by her mother, an educator who assisted immigrant parents navigating the American school system for their children. Her mother showed her that “to give someone a sense of pride or ownership helps them become better.” Now a political science and history teacher at KIPP St. Louis High School in St. Louis, Alejandro uses WE’s service-learning resources to strengthen her class curriculum, help her students give back to their community and develop a sense of pride. With her guidance and WE’s support, her students have volunteered at senior care homes and distributed care packages to homeless shelters. Alejandro believes these experiences give them a sense of self-determination. Her passion and enthusiasm, coupled with the need in her school community, resulted in her being nominated to receive a $500 WE Teachers award which will help Alejandro equip her classroom.
Last April, onstage at WE Day St. Louis, Miriam Alejandro was presented with a $500 WE Teachers award to purchase much-needed school supplies for her classroom. Ten years ago, Alejandro would never have imagined herself in this position. The carefully plotted life plan she’d created as a child would need to be completely rewritten before she could discover the best way to make an impact.
Alejandro had always known that she wanted to help others. She grew up in the Bronx in New York City, the borough with some of the city’s highest poverty rates. She knew that if she wanted to make a difference she’d need to be in the right profession. She started in law, and then found her passion tutoring youth and a new plan emerged: “I needed to help those kids before they go on to the wider world.
Alejandro earned a master’s degree in education and began teaching in the South Bronx, not far from where she grew up. Now, she teaches political science and history at KIPP St. Louis High School in St. Louis.
She credits her early drive to help others to her mother, an educator who created software that helped immigrant parents navigate the American school system for their children. She’d come to New York from Puerto Rico in the 1980s and raised Alejandro and her three siblings by herself. Watching the way her mother inspired confidence in everyone around her taught Alejandro that “to give someone a sense of pride or ownership helps them become better.”
Alejandro has enshrined that approach in her own classroom among her students, whom she calls scholars. “It’s a reciprocal relationship, so if I’m not disrespectful to them, they’re not disrespectful to me.”
This desire to help her students be the best possible versions of themselves drew her to service-learning. She uses WE resources to strengthen her class curriculum and to help her students create and lead their own WE Club. Her students have volunteered at senior care homes and distributed care packages at homeless shelters. Alejandro believes these experiences give them a sense of self-determination that they may not have had otherwise.
“Even though it’s a high-needs school in a low-income area, these scholars are able to reach pinnacles that people are not even aware of,” she says.
Walgreens knows that at the heart of every community are our unsung heroes—teachers. That’s why they’ve partnered with WE to develop a program that provides free tools and resources to teachers nationwide to help them address the changing needs of their classrooms, like funding and addressing critical social issues.
