Paving the Way to Citizenship
Project Citizenship executive director Veronica Serrato (LAW’88) says she is paying forward the educational, economic, and health benefits she has been given simply by being born north of the border.
They are determined to use their experience, influence, and positions to help make their business, organization, and world a more inclusive place. They are breaking barriers—and then reaching back to help those behind them overcome the same hurdles. They are mentoring students or younger colleagues, hiring diverse candidates, offering opportunities, and ensuring that employees succeed and are promoted so that their workplace and their communities reflect the richness and talents of the country’s increasingly diverse population.
They are BU alumni, faculty, and staff—of every race, ethnicity, age, and gender—and they are “Opening Doors” for the next generation.
Veronica Serrato (’88) applied to Harvard without help from anyone, not from her Mexican immigrant parents, not from a high-priced, private consultant—that profession hardly existed back then—and not even from the guidance counselor at her all-girls Catholic high school in suburban Chicago, where Serrato was one of the top two students.
“She said I’d never get into Harvard. She’d throw me a parade if I got in,” recalls Serrato, the eldest of five children and the first person in her family to even dream of college. “I applied anyway.”
That same indomitable spirit, that refusal to take no for an answer, drives her work today as leader of Project Citizenship, a Boston-based nonprofit that helps permanent immigrants navigate the dauntingly cumbersome bureaucratic process of becoming naturalized US citizens.
Although her guidance counselor may not have regarded Serrato as Harvard material, Harvard had, in fact, sent her an application in the mail. Shutting herself up in her bedroom with her knockoff Smith Corona and her Merriam-Webster Collegiate dictionary with the red cover falling off, she banged out her application to Harvard—and one to Stanford.
She got into both, and in fall 1980, her father, a highly skilled welder who hadn’t had the opportunity to go beyond the sixth grade in Mexico, piled the family into his van and drove his 18-year-old daughter to Cambridge. It was her first visit to Harvard, her first trip East—and it would be her first time away from her close-knit family.
“College blew me open,” says Serrato (LAW’88).
After graduating from Harvard with a BA in government and political science, she went on to the BU School of Law, then spent more than two decades as a public interest lawyer advocating for low-income families and children before becoming executive director of Project Citizenship. “I was lucky to be born on this side of the border,” Serrato says. “I’ve always wanted to pay forward the opportunities that I received.”
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