I wouldn't be where I am today
without the people that have helped me
and that have mentored me
and have provided opportunities for me.
My name is Lucero Lara and I am in my masters program in sports law and business and I play
soccer here at ASU.
I grew up on the Navajo reservation.
We have a huge high school dropout rate.
It is just not an idea to go out and do something with your life.
It is rather to stick where you are and do nothing about it.
Being in foster care meant that I didn't exactly have two parents to provide for me to go to college
and that there was not an automatic funding source for me.
And the scholarships have allowed me the opportunity to come to ASU.
Man, when I got offered that full ride, I couldn’t believe it.
Just for one of us to go to college would change the path of our whole family.
It literally changed my life.
And I am going to get a good job because I am going to get a master’s and that is something
I never thought could happen to a small girl like me from Como-Pickton, Texas.
–I am an American Indian studies major and my dream right now is to go back to
my community and become like a community action worker or even a teacher.
Overall I just want to make my community a lot better than it is now.
–Today, I am one of 20,000 students in the engineering college and to my knowledge
I am the only completely blind student here
and I want to change that number.
I want to make a difference for people with disabilities, specifically blindness.
–By having a really good support system and mentors, professors, peers, things like that
makes me want to be that person for someone else because I value that role in my life.
–I am a National Merit Scholar.
What I really was hoping for was to be at a place that provided a lot of opportunities to learn
and to be connected to resources both for studying right now and in the future.
ASU really does champion the success of students.
I am surrounded by people, by peers who because they have received the support to come here
have been able to do really incredible things and that is a really unique and wonderful
thing to experience at ASU.
–I love what we are about here.
Being the most innovative school in the country, bringing students from every state in the
United States and 120 different countries to come here and really think about how they
want to impact the world not just what they want to study
is unbelievable to get to recruit to.
When you think about these large institutions, it’s possible to think about them as kind of
these big machines that just kind of run, but what is really interesting and what
I feel being here at ASU, is how much the individual matters,
an individual teacher, an individual project,
an idea that just starts with you know maybe just three students and a teacher
thinking “We can go do this.”
Those ideas need to be nurtured,
and they are nurtured through private support.
As a public university, as a people’s university, we are very much dependent upon finding a
way to mass support for what we are doing, that is buy in to what we are doing.
Campaign ASU 2020 is our moment in time to say “Yes, we have been able to do that,
look at who we are, it is not just the faculty it is not just the students,
it’s not just the staff.
It’s the hundreds of thousands of people and the thousands of organizations that are
behind us to move this university forward.
One of the things ASU, we pride ourselves on is innovation
and innovation does not happen without risk.
What private philanthropic dollars are able to do for us, is to take great risks.
I think ASU has been a lab amongst universities for doing what can be done
and that is an act of the imagination.
It’s exciting to be in a place that believes that and that lives that.
The funding that I have received gave me a particular advantage of being able to try
something new and develop it into the leading therapeutic for Ebola.
I can’t tell you how wonderful it feels to be a scientist who started with a crazy idea
and ending up seeing that our product, our experimental product saved lives in Africa.
I am truly grateful for the different support systems I had
while I was a student pursuing a start up venture.
- Having those funds from those donors themselves is not taken for granted because without the
scholarship itself I probably wouldn’t even be here and probably wouldn’t even have the motivation
or the support that I have now.
- It is people like you that make me believe
and have faith that good things can happen to people.
With hard work and dedication you can be somebody.
- What I would say to our potential donors to our campaign is “Join us.”
Be part of this excitement.
It’s infectious.
- We need continued, sustained support in all of its iterations.
- To have communities that are healthy, that are educated, that are forward thinking,
can only happen by contributing and supporting innovative, visionary institutions like
Arizona State University.
- The difference that we make is scalable.
We affect tens of thousands of students lives, millions of people’s lives. We affect the
trajectory of the outcome of our society, but most important I think at the root of it
is that we produce people.
It is these people that are going to go out and produce the new ideas, produce the changes
and in our case across the entire spectrum of society.
So your impact would be very significant through investing in ASU.
–Together,
–our potential
–is limitless.