The Journey

Our group consisted of 4 Computer Science majors and an Industrial Engineering major. Back in

2019, we were tasked by one of our professors to identify a problem in our community and use

the engineering skills we were learning as part of our degrees to help address this issue. Through

our research, our experiences and those from people we knew, we realized that easy access to

financial, academic, and other supportive resources for undocumented students was scarce.

Although many such resources exist, we found that the outreach of these resources was severely lacking and that due to this

many undocumented students were not making the transition from high school to higher education because they were

unaware of many of the resources and opportunities available to them. Thus, we decided that we would create a website to

serve as a hub for all Illinois resources available to the undocumented community to help increase the amount of

undocumented students that pursue a higher education and to help create a network of support. In 2020, when the pandemic

began and practically every aspect of our lives became virtual, we realized that now, our website would be needed more than

ever.

— Tosan, 2020

We began reaching out to the UIC Office of Diversity in order to determine the feasibility of our project as well as to begin to

plan out how we should go about creating such a resource. Through the Office of Diversity we were also able to establish a

partnership with the Illinois Dream Fund who shared resources and supported us through the development process. We also

reached out to other universities, colleges, and organizations to let them know about our idea and to ask them if they would

like to provide any of their resources and collaborate with us on this endeavor. To our surprise and delight, we received an

overwhelmingly positive response from those we talked to and were able to begin collating information for the site and begin

designing it and by the end of 2020, we were ready to begin development.

We want this site to become a living resource that continues to grow and change as more resources become available and

to continue to improve the quality of information that we are trying to circulate through the undocumented community. Our

overall goal is to ensure that everyone is aware of the opportunities that are available to them and that nobody feels like they

have to give up on their dreams simply because of a few missing documents.