After examining the plight of young women and Latinos in New Jersey, Dr. Gloria Bonilla-Santiago wanted to design a summer internship program that would encourage more minorities and female students to attend graduate school.

“I saw a decline in the number of minority students, particularly Latino students, who were going to graduate school. My work has really been about social justice and really building leadership and capacity building for minority communities in the area of leadership development,” says Bonilla-Santiago, the Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of Urban Studies at Rutgers University’s Camden campus. “The vision was to really create a pipeline program for Latino leaders. A lot of our Latino young leaders were not really entering into positions of influence.”

In 1990, she established the Latino Fellows Public Policy Leadership Institute. As a component of the university’s Center for Strategic Urban Community Leadership, which she also created, the institute is designed to encourage Hispanic students to pursue graduate studies in public policy with the long-term goal of increasing the presence of Latinos in leadership positions throughout the country, says Bonilla-Santiago.

In addition to a weekly leadership training seminar, participants attend an internship four days a week during the summer. Internships are located throughout the state of New Jersey and include government, private sector and nonprofit opportunities. Bonilla-Santiago also notes that the leadership institute provides mentorship opportunities and recruiting events where participants meet with graduate school representatives from colleges across the country. She adds that the leadership institute is funded by the state’s Department of Community Affairs and the Center for Hispanic Policy, Research & Development.

“It’s interdisciplinary so the students learn issues of professional development and problem solving … how to understand the economy and how to better understand the social conditions in their communities,” says Bonilla-Santiago, who adds over 500 students have graduated from the program since its inception.