For more than a year University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has partnered with New American Workforce to help provide free citizenship assistance to their employees. The university has reached out to its 5,000 employees and their family members to offer citizenship education and invite them to a combination of both information and application workshops on campus. Thanks to the collaboration, many of its employees have already been able to apply for citizenship. Dario, originally for Mexico and a current senior custodian at UCLA, is one of these employees.
For Dario, obtaining citizenship will mean “living better in this country and being able to vote. It means being stable and the ability to elect a representative, a president or a governor in a state. The assistance is really good, it is a motivation. A lot of times people stop trying because they are always working. That’s why it is perfect that UCLA is letting us go during our work hours because then we don’t have to miss a workday.”
Dario Garcia Mendoza
University of California, Los Angeles
New American Workforce Participant