At NC State, various student organizations are focused on providing aid beyond campus grounds. Juntos at NC State, a Latinx organization focused on helping high school students graduate, is one of those organizations, putting together a large network of NC State alumni to help out the local community. 

According to Juntos alumnus Michael Nunez, a third-year studying computer engineering, Juntos is still growing, but former members and current members alike appreciate the relationships they have been able to develop as a result of being a part of Juntos.

“With the alumni that I have reached out to and I have heard from, it’s been a really good experience,” Nunez said. “And it just brings back the mentoring feeling that they gave me years ago, as well as nostalgia. So it’s totally a loving community when you’re around the alumni and people who are part of the program, as well as working with them.”

To go along with the organization’s objectives, Juntos lays out four key components that compose the club. The first, and “core component,” according to the Juntos website, is family engagement. Juntos and its members pride themselves on being able to help out families and bring forth community togetherness.

“It’s an organization focused around the Hispanic community,” Nunez said. “We’ve seen that there’s a lack of representation on these campuses as well as at professions that are just dominated by just, only a few races. So we want to provide, is, to allow the type of stewardship delegation, mentorship, and to provide an experience to enhance the character and the skill for each Hispanic to get to where they need to be and where they want to be.”

Juntos also provides 4H clubs, where students and alumni are able to provide community service, as well as other practical skills such as tutoring. The organization also provides monthly one-on-one coaching sessions and summer programming, which includes the Juntos Summer Academy.

“With the workshops, they definitely try to reinforce skills and show you the path to learn new skills [that] allow you to have more opportunities along the way,” Nunez said. “The staff has shown that every single day, they face adversity. And that’s how they practice what they preach too. So that’s something, you know, if you have role models, I think that’s a big thing.”

According to the Juntos web page, the Juntos Summer Academy is a week-long program that allows students to engage in hands-on classes, structured activities and panels. As an alum, Nunez greatly enjoyed his time at Juntos, and attributes the organization with some of his success and admittance to NC State.

“Mainly, like, for my experience, they gave me a lot of mentoring,” Nunez said. “As well as a lot of workshops to gain a lot of skills to, to apply it to many different places that allowed me to reinforce the skills and to, to practically make a stronger, better, and allow me to get faster at it to the point that I was able to build the care to get to where I am today.”

Much like every other NC State organization and club, Juntos found itself impacted by the onset of COVID-19, something the club struggled with, according to Jessica Aguilar, graduate assistant of Juntos.

“As soon as COVID hit, we were restricted to spaces we could allow our parents and students to be in,” Aguilar said. “So I did everything 100% virtual, with the exception of drive-through events… [We would] provide services, provide food donated from other nonprofit organizations, school supplies donated from other organizations.”

According to Aguilar, virtual participation for the regular events was not as high as it would have been in an in-person year. Aguilar also said that it was hard to get students and parents to pay attention for longer than an hour, partly on the behalf of the virtual setting.

However, Juntos did have a successful food drive this past year, one of the few live events they were able to host.

“We’re pretty big on doing community service,” Aguilar said. “The community service that we did was my students. They did a food drive. So they were basically collecting canned donations, and we had a successful food drive, but that was the only community service event we could do.”

With the organization returning to in-person events, Aguilar said that Juntos has faced some unexpected difficulties.

“I would say at first, a lot of the students were eager, and so were coordinators, to be able to provide that service in person again to students,” Aguilar said. “Right now, I think we’re waiting to see if that’s still gonna stay the same. But a lot of students, they would rather do multiple events. … They need that in-person interaction. It’s very difficult to try to get them to be engaged through Zoom anymore.”

Aguilar said that the organization tries to help its students with “the little things,” with the organization offering hotspots and laptops to assist students with homework.

“Something to know is just like, trying to understand the resiliency of our high school students right now,” Aguilar said. “Trying to provide the best services for them to have resources to mitigate the negative impacts of COVID-19. I think it’s going to be very difficult within the next couple of years as a lot of these students transition into the University. But right now, as an organization, we’re just trying to provide the safest resources because we don’t want to put any of our families in any kind of danger.”

Juntos’ office is located at 111 Lampe Dr. If you are interested in helping out with the organization, you can contact Juntos via email at juntosprogram@ncsu.edu or its hotline at (919) 515-3854.