SHINING A LIGHT ON LESSER-KNOWN HISTORY

Meet Daily Point of Light Award honoree Magalena Mercado. Read her story, and nominate an outstanding volunteer or family as a Daily Point of Light.

Magdalena Mercado didn’t see her culture’s history reflected in her school’s curriculum. That’s when she knew it was time to take action.

As a Filipino-American, Magdalena knew that high schools in her native California were working to boost their history curriculum to include teachings on Asian American, Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) history. But at her boarding school in Massachusetts, Magdalena didn’t see those topics covered. In her freshman year, she gathered a small group of fellow students at her school who felt similarly and started plotting how they could change the curriculum. Magdalena founded Taking a Deeper Dive, a youth-led organization dedicated to creating student-made resources and educational toolkits for AANHPI cultural education and history. With the help of the faculty at her boarding school, Magdalena made it clear that all facets of history should be covered and became a powerful advocate for equity and cultural education.

Now a senior in high school, Taking a Deeper Dive has grown exponentially. Magdalena has mobilized 20 schools nationwide and raised $10,000 to fight for AANHPI cultural education and systemic change. When asked how she’s managed to balance running any organization with her heavy workload throughout her entire high school experience, Magdalena credits the fellow students that she leans on to help run Taking a Deeper Dive in assisting her to create a sense of balance. As a result, she’s hoping to take her AANHPI education to the next level. When Magdalena starts college next year, she’s hoping to study political science and potentially attend law school. She’s also eyeing Asian-American Studies as a major, taking the experience of what she’s currently doing with Taking a Deeper Dive and using it as a guidebook for her future. No matter where she goes, Magdalena will never stop advocating to make sure AANHPI history cannot be erased.

What inspires you to volunteer?

I’ve always felt like helping the people around me. It was something instilled within me when I was young. I’m an older sister to two younger sisters. Helping others was something that I was taught growing up within my family. Being able to grow up in places that foster service and foster community has been almost unavoidable when you were taught to do those things growing up. I think it’s something that was also instilled within me through the different spaces I’ve been in through my community. Being able to volunteer, especially in a place where I’m independent, like a boarding school, is really nice, because it has allowed me to help my community through this initiative.

What inspired you to get started with this initiative?

In my freshman year, I founded my initiative, Taking a Deep Dive. It had to do with the history curriculum at my school. I think what made it so hard was that I didn’t see AANHPI teachings in the classrooms. Even though I’ve gone to school in California, where schools are enacting policies to implement ethnic or Asian American Studies in the classrooms, that wasn’t necessarily happening at my school. I brought together a bunch of students who felt passionate about the same issue and wanted to propose the same sort of idea of creating a student-led curriculum, where we could create student educational toolkits and resources for AANHPI history to be taught in classrooms. It was a small group of students just started at my school, starting with a group of 10 students. Now we’ve grown within our school, but we’ve also expanded across boarding schools in the northeast and to schools all over the place. We’ve grown over the last couple of years, but it definitely was a small start.

Tell us about your volunteer role with Taking a Deep Dive.

I founded this project, but I also do a lot of executive directing in this case. The process was bringing students together and coming up with the proposed idea, working with students and faculty at my school, and making sure that there were adults who wanted to listen. I came forward with the idea and got a lot of students on board. Now that we’re a couple of years in, I’m directing the organization. Examples are delegating tasks and making sure that everyone has a voice in this process. It’s being able to work with students, as a student myself. It’s very much a shared leadership process, being both a founder and also being able to direct the organization.

What are your long-term plans or goals for the organization?

We recently received a grant recognizing us for our social entrepreneurship and nonprofit work. Right now, we use digital resources that we share with our students, and we give them lesson plans and student-made curriculum that we make together so they can use them in their spaces, at their schools and within the classroom. But something we want to do with that grant money is make a printed guidebook. We’re in the process right now of making and curating all of the different digital resources that we might have for creating this book that we could print and distribute across schools. We really just want to be able to try to keep things local to Massachusetts right now, because this is our founding state.

What’s been the most rewarding part of your work?

Being able to grow so much in this process as a person, but also being able to grow alongside other student leaders and be able to help people feel like they can have a voice in this process. I feel like this is an issue that I feel might seem very small to some people, but especially in my community, I think it does just feel like there is a lot of weight that comes with being able to address this issue and making sure that we’re able to provide resources that are created by students. I stepped into this with 10 students, and now we’ve been able to grow across so many schools and across so many states and meet so many people at these conferences. I think that’s been the most rewarding– just being able to see how far this has come.

What have you learned through your experiences as a volunteer?

The biggest thing that I learned was how to organize and be able to work alongside so many people. Even in school, you don’t get that same sort of hands-on experience where you’re working with so many people at once. I learned how to work with other people in this process, especially so many people at once. I had never done volunteering to this extent, where I was working with so many people. That’s my favorite part about volunteering, just being able to meet so many people who are all working and pushing for the same thing. In the long run, they become people you can turn back to. Being able to work with so many people in a really fun environment.

Any advice for people who want to start volunteering?

If you feel like there is a cause that you want to fight for, then just start reaching out to the people around you and reach out to your direct community first. You are going to find somebody who will be able to help you and wants to help you engage in community service or volunteering. To be a founder, I brought together students and faculty to help create this initiative and kick-start the volunteering and service program. It’s a matter of reaching out to those people and reaching out to your direct community first, to see where they can point you. Reaching out to your community to be able to understand how to engage in it and help it, and also making sure that you’re doing a certain level of research to understand what kind of volunteering you want to do, but also maybe understand what kind of project you might want to establish.

What do you want people to learn from your story?

I hope they can take away the understanding of the importance of an AANHPI education in schools. But I also hope other students feel inspired to engage in their community, especially from the founder side. I think it’s the most interesting way to get involved in volunteering and community engagement because you’re not stepping into an already creative volunteering program. It’s totally original. It shows that helping your community is just a very fluid thing. If you’re creating your own project, you’re just identifying a cause that you specifically care about. And it shows that in creating a project, whether it be on a small or large scale, that you’re still making the active decision to help your community.

Do you want to make a difference in your community like Magdalena? Find local volunteer opportunities.