Aliento celebrates 10 years, remains committed to assisting immigrant youth

Aliento is a youth-led nonprofit organization aiming to serve students, DACA recipients and immigrant families. Its motto is to “transform trauma into hope and action,” striving to create an environment where human potential is nurtured and not defined by immigration status.

June also marked the 14th anniversary of DACA, a moment that signifies the emergence of a generation actively shaping America’s economic, civic and cultural landscape.

Reyna Montoya, DACA recipient and founder of Aliento, joined “Arizona Horizon” to share her background and how it shaped the founding of her organization.

In the decade that Aliento has been serving the community, Montoya reflected on how the program has changed overtime and how the people they serve have changed along side them.

“It has definitely evolved. I mean even the DACA program, when we were really launching Aliento back in the summer of 2016, a lot of the DACA recipients were the young people. Were out of high school, were in college. Now fast forward 10 years later, they are the parents of our children we serve,” Montoya said.

Montoya says that she has seen a lot of stress and concern amongst the people that she serves regarding the current status of the DACA program. But on the other side of this, she also says she sees “hope” and what this means in terms of Aliento’s role within it all.

“What I get to see is that students are re-enrolling back to school. One of our huge milestones at Aliento is that we were able to link arms with the Arizona borders and now we have a reinstated in-state tuition. Our students are going back to the classrooms and graduating. We have our first nurse who is a graduate, no longer a student and helping patients,” Montoya said. 

For Aliento, some of the young people that they serve have been impacted by the growing number of detentions in the state. Montoya shared how outreach and providing support is important during these times of need.

“35,000 of them have been young people. So many of them said like hey, I saw you on social media, I saw you on TikTok, on Instagram. Some of them, we coming to the schools and we provide that support to ensure that we’re meeting students where they’re at and reminding them that they belong and there’s so much power and brilliance in them,” Montoya said.