Report cover featuring protest posters about the dream
Immigrant Inclusion & Racial Justice

January 2013

Prepared by Arely Zimmerman, Anthony Perez, Michelle Saucedo, Jennifer Ito, and Manuel Pastor, commissioned by the UCLA Labor Center, and funded by Unbound Philanthropy

Please note: reports dated earlier than June 2020 were published under our previous names: the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) or the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII).

Cultivating the Dream: Evaluating the Impact of Dream Summer on a New Generation of Leaders highlighted the key findings from an evaluation of the first two years of Dream Summer, a program organized by the UCLA Labor Center that places immigrant students and activists in summer internships. The researchers found that the program was having a clear and direct impact on interns’ lives, not only in terms of professional development, but also in terms of their identity building, self-esteem, and inter-personal relationship—capacities that would help them excel both academically, professional, and as movement building leaders.

For host organizations, the most commonly cited benefit was having interns help them reach immigrant and youth populations more effectively. The report’s main take-away was that Dream Summer was effective in achieving its outcomes of professional leadership development because it was undertaken in the context of social justice movement building.

Download report

Cultivating the Dream: Evaluating the Impact of Dream Summer on a New Generation of Leaders

Partners

 

UCLA Labor Center
The mission of the UCLA Labor Center is to promote research, education, and policy change to improve the lives of workers, students, and our communities. The Labor Center is part of the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

Dream Resource Center
The Dream Resource Center was created in 2011 to develop educational and policy materials to help undocumented students access higher education.

Read our other publications by research area

    Immigrant Integration & Racial Justice

    Our work on immigrant integration and racial justice brings together three emphases: scholarship that draws on academic theory and rigorous research, data that provides information structured to highlight the process of immigrant integration over time, and engagement that seeks to create new dialogues with government, community organizers, business and civic leaders, immigrants and the voting public to advance immigrant integration and racial equity.

    Economic Inclusion & Climate Equity

    In the area of economic inclusion, we at ERI advance academic theory and practical applications linking economic growth, environmental quality, and civic health with bridging of racial and other gaps; produce accessible and actionable data and analysis through the data tools; and establish research partnerships to deepen and advance the dialogue, planning, and actions around racial equity, environmental justice, and the built environment.

    Social Movements & Governing Power

    ERI’s work in the area of governing power includes: conducting cross-disciplinary studies of today’s social movements, supporting learning and strategizing efforts to advance dialogues among organizers, funders, intermediaries, evaluators, and academics, and developing research-based social change frameworks and tools to inform — and be informed by — real-world, real-time efforts towards a vision of deep change.

    Publications Directory

    In 2020, the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) and the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII) merged to form the USC Equity Research Institute (ERI).

    The full list of publications published under our previous and current names can be found in our publications directory.

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