Congratulations to our Student Laura Czerniecki for receiving The Dolores Huerta Community Service Award!!
Laura Czerniecki is an international student whose passion for Latin America and languages stems from her Brazilian heritage and multicultural upbringing. At UCLA, she has received departmental honors and pursued community engagement and professional opportunities that service the Latinx community. Under the guidance of Doctora Suhr, she recently completed a project investigating the disproportionate impacts of human trafficking on the Latinx community through the lens of her experience as an Anti-Trafficking intern at the International Rescue Committee. Laura is currently finishing her Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and Portuguese, after which she will pursue law school.
Congrats Laura!
The Dolores Huerta Community Service Award
Dolores Huerta is a civil rights activist and community organizer. She has worked for labor rights and social justice for more than 50 years. In 1962, she and Cesar Chavez founded the United Farm Workers union. She served as vice president and played a critical role in many of the union’s accomplishments for four decades. In 2002, she received the Puffin/Nation prize for Creative Citizenship, which she used to establish the Dolores Huerta Foundation (DHF). DHF is connecting groundbreaking community-based organizing to state and national movements to register and educate voters, advocate for education reform, bring about infrastructure improvements in low-income communities, advocate for greater equality for the community and create strong leadership development. She has received numerous awards, including The Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award from President Bill Clinton in 1998. In 2012, President Obama bestowed Huerta with The Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. The Dolores Huerta Community Service Award is a way to acknowledge our students’ involvement with the Latinx communities at UCLA and the greater Los Angeles area through the Community-engaged Learning Program. This inaugural award will be presented by Dolores Huerta, at our End of the Year Online Celebration Ceremony on Saturday, June 12th, 2021.