Dreamers Roadmap: An App Finding College Funding for Undocumented Students
Finding money to pay for college is a daunting task, but for undocumented Dreamers with aspirations of getting a college education, the landscape can be even more bewildering. One Dreamer, Sarahi Espinoza Salamanca, says she's working on an app for that, thanks to her own overwhelming experience with the financial side of college.
"Everybody wanted to know why I wasn't going to college," said Salamanca, a budding Latina entrepreneur and former DACA student. With an impressive high school academic track record, a load of extracurricular activities on her resume, and obvious talent and drive, Salamaca told GoodCall in a recent interview that that questions dogged her after graduation.
"It was just too overwhelming," she added, "just to hear the word 'college' because I knew I couldn't go."
Then someone at her church asked her the same question, and Salamanca divulged that she wouldn't be able to pay for college as an undocumented student and was overwhelmed at the prospect. Luckily for Salamanca, the lady at the church knew a path forward.
"She told me, you're mistaken, you could go to college, there's a counselor at the community college here in Cupertino. He can help you. He helps undocumented students go to college all the time," recounted Salamanca.
With the help of the counselor, Salmanca found ways to pay for college, and soon made it her mission to help other Dreamers do the same, providing accurate information on scholarship and other funding opportunities for undocumented students through an app she's developing, called Dreamer's Roadmap.
Expected to launch in March, Dreamer's Roadmap provides three avenues for undocumented students with aspirations for higher education to get the information they need.
First, the low-tech method: Users can register an account with just an email address, which Dreamer's Roadmap will use to send out information on upcoming or new scholarships available to undocumented students.
But even if users don't want to create an account, they can take advantage of an "explore" and "search" feature -- something Salamanca decided to add due to her experience.
"I was kind of pushed to share my story nationally, and then became comfortable sharing," said Salamanca. "But, the first time was really scary, so I identify with people being afraid of exposing information."
Next, if users have a mobile device, Dreamer's Roadmap can keep them even more up to date, sending push notifications of opportunities and scholarship deadlines instantly. With an account, the scholarship opportunities are filtered to best match profile information such as location, DACA registration, and education level.
Finally, there's a crowdsourcing side built into Dreamer's Roadmap, so users can contribute to a bustling hive-mind database made up of word-of-mouth opportunities that might otherwise not make wide circulation online. Salamanca's system vets every crowd-sourced scholarship tip before it's shared.
Salamanca has been working on Dreamer's Roadmap for years now, and has had help along the way from Latino-focused events and competitions. In 2013, she took part in the Dreamers Hackathon, sponsored in part by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's immigration advocacy group.
Then in 2014, she took part in the Voto Latino Innovators Challenge, becoming one of only eight finalists, and eventually winning first place -- which awarded her $100,000 to build the app.
She's been a long way from feeling there was no opportunities, even for getting a college degree, to finding the entrepreneurial mainline of the Latino tech community -- and finding an entrepreneurial way to open opportunities to others like herself.
"It's still kind of shocking to me," she said to GoodCall. "It's kind of unheard of because when I started this, I was undocumented. I was an undocumented Latina in tech."
Be sure to check out GoodCall's full feature interview for more on Salamanca's road to creating Dreamer's Roadmap.