With the opening of 2023, EPLN celebrates two years of being a 501(c)(3) non-profit and going into the first year of the relaunch of our website and mentorship program. This past year, we hosted two events, welcomed new team members, revamped our operations and mentorship program, and raised over $1,000 in donations towards the organization and its mission.
We began the year with the EPLN Education Conference in January where the importance of education and statistics were discussed. During the spring, EPLN experienced a transition period as new board members joined the team, and our website was entirely overhauled over the summer. Our revamped mentorship program began in October, and we ended the year with a second in-person networking event in December. The spring programming is set to begin in early February.
Welcoming a New Board of Directors
We are excited to welcome back Aldrin Ballesteros, former mentor and Director of Mentorship Programs, as the new Vice President of EPLN. His involvement in EPLN and the mentorship program has been invaluable and his dedicated efforts have made the continuation of our mentorship program and the scholarship awards possible.
Our New Director of Educational Programs, Janine Knauerhase, joined us in early summer 2022 and has been responsible for the development of the Fall 2022 Junior and Senior mentorship curriculums, putting together the new EPLN website, and assisting in general operations.
Ricardo Alvidrez has stepped into the role of Director of Finance and EPLN is grateful for his support in managing the finances for putting together our second in-person event of the 2022 year.
Read more about our full board of directors here.
New and Improved Website
For easy access to content and community engagement, we decided to completely update our website to become more interactive and centralize all our information, with more updates and resources to come. Moving the mentorship program to the online platform will also enable us to better measure engagement and easily update material.
Highlights:
Mentors and mentees have their own member accounts where they can access tailored Junior and Senior year programs with a full step-by-step curriculum, supporting documents, and additional program-specific resources.
Find additional learning content by partner organization, Cultivating Tomorrow, on the Resources Tab.
Read more about EPLN, our mission, and progress through our recently added "News" page.
More publicly available resources to come!
Fundraising
Thanks to our participation in El Paso Giving Day and the support of all of our members’ donations, EPLN was able to fundraise over $2,000 in 2022 alone. Since our organization was founded, we have gathered over $5,000, and our goal is to increase our funds to $10,000. With this financial ability, we hope to expand our scholarship program, host networking events, and provide more resources to our community.
EPLN Winter Networking Event
We are proud to have organized and hosted this in-person networking event on December 22nd where we hosted twenty mentors, mentees, and other EPLN community members for networking, dinner, and the awarding of two $1000 scholarships to a mentor and mentee.
We would like to congratulate Julian Ronquillo, a mentor and engineering student at UTEP, and Abigail Navarro, a Senior EPLN mentee, for being awarded the scholarships. Both Julian and Abigail have participated in the EPLN Scholars mentorship program since 2021.
Moving Forward
Since the El Paso Leadership Network was first founded we have served 40+ mentors and mentees. Our goal is to support the El Paso community by providing information, resources, opportunities and education for El Paso youth to succeed. In 2023, we plan to add further resources and content including a dedicated page with internship/career opportunities and scholarships, tailored to different fields of interest and the El Paso area. As announced earlier in the year, we have also officially partnered with Cultivating Tomorrow to share and collaborate in developing education-centered learning materials.
If you are interested in supporting our mission in any way, visit our "Get Involved" page and let us know what you would like to contribute, whether it's hosting a webinar, a collaboration, or volunteering resources and skills in some other way. You can also find the "Donate" button at the bottom of our website where you can provide a donation to help us in further building our organization and keep offering scholarships.
With your help, we are continuing to grow as an educational non-profit organization, fundraising, creating partnerships, improving our mentorship program, reimagining our website, and hosting in-person events. Thank you for your continued involvement in our organization. We look forward to keep working with you to serve our community of El Paso.
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