Impact stories

Born in Mendoza (Argentina), the 18 y/o Melina Santiago is the new Alumni Coordinator for Salesforce at LALA. She studies Social Entrepreneurship at Lynn University in the United States and found out about LALA in 2020 when her university sent her a list of internships. LALA caught her attention- first, because it was the only

Being the founder of two of the best-known free foreign language teaching organizations in the country —Globalizando and Wanderlust—, Leonardo Neto is a familiar face to many education activists in Brazil. In his trajectory, he has been engaged with several projects that have education as their primary focus, as it is the main cause he

Participating in the Math Olympiads is a pretty impressive achievement, but Caio Lopes was not content enough with participating in the system. In fact, he and some of his friends saw flaws in how it worked, so they set out to create an Olympiad with a completely different structure that would benefit students more. “My

“I saw my father cry, and it was the first time I saw him cry, and then we lost our house and had to move suddenly, and then a few months later, I was rejected from every college I applied to, all in a really short period of time.” But Ernesto Nam turned these difficult

In the small town of Passira in the countryside of Pernambuco, Brazil, Alfredo Neto was pondering the next moves in his educational journey. “It is such a small town that we don’t have places such as malls and movie theaters, so people here gather in the main square,” Alfredo said. “But we also don’t have

Barriers have never scared away Mary Ann Arizaga. If anything, all they have done is motivate her further to find unique solutions to what she identifies as some of the most pressing problems in her community and those around the world: Global warming, environmental consciousness, mental health resources, and a wealth of opportunities for people

Flávia Iespa was only eleven when she realized she wanted to attend one of the best schools in Brazil, Colégio Militar do Rio de Janeiro, which also happened to have one of the most difficult entrance exams in the country. The journey she and her mother had to embark on to make her dream come

Being sent to military school is often depicted in the entertainment industry as a form of punishment for an unruly kid, but Sofia Amaral, 19, not only felt that being sent to Colégio Militar in her home country of Brazil was one of the best decisions her parents ever made, but she also admired them

Realizing how fortunate she was to go to a well-run public high school in Brazil, Bianca Vasconcelos started investigating further what perpetuated the issues at other schools in her country as well as other problems around the globe, eventually throwing herself into Model UN. “My original interest in the models started because I love to

Back in Asuncion, Paraguay, with his three siblings and black Chow Chow, Gonzalo Villalba reflected on his past educational experiences with his impending learnings at the LALA Academy, which will precede his biomedical engineering education at Dartmouth College, serving as a backdrop. “In Paraguay, we have limited resources. Even though I tried to create more