From Student to Teacher: ARC Graduate Gives Back

Zulema Medina, a 2009 ARC summer course graduate, knew what to expect becoming a teacher at Kings Beach Elementary in September 2019. She was a unique first-year teacher because she had been a student, college volunteer, and student teacher at the school. Zulema had learned to read on King Beach Elementary School’s brightly-colored carpets as a child. Some […]

Watch ARC Alum on ABC10!

ARC summer graduate and Young Professionals Board member, Gustavo Garcia, was on ABC in Sacramento last week! He promoted ARC’s summer course (applications are due on April 23), and he celebrated our partnership with Tahoe Fund. Gus shared at the end of the interview, “Right now, I am in college studying political science at the University of the […]

Finding Home with ARC: A Journey From Mexico to Dartmouth

Alexis Angulo began his ARC transformational essay with the question “What is home?”  He wrote the essay in the final week of the 2015 Yosemite Summer Immersion Course, which he attended as a rising high school junior.  Like many of us in high school, Alexis was questioning his identity and how he fit into the larger world. He […]

Identity Crisis: Overcoming a Clash of Cultures with ARC

As a teenager, Michelle Lee was at the center of a clash of cultures.  At home in Merced, as a young Hmong woman, she imagined a traditional path for her future: marriage and nurturing children.  She spoke only Hmong at home with her Mom.  Meanwhile, at school, she was bullied when she used the language […]

ARC Alum Becomes A Cowboy Conservationist

Charly Mijares spent a lot of his childhood in the outdoors, but it wasn’t the glaciated peaks of Yosemite’s high country that were his first stomping grounds. From the time he was ten years old, he remembers, he would help his father weed out pomegranate orchards, train horses, and build irrigation ditches. He says, “In […]