She went to the financial aid night to help somebody else
Yenli Gaytan grew up in Greenville, the daughter of parents from Zacatecas, Mexico who came to the United States with plenty of ambition and no map for how any of it was supposed to work. She went to Carolina High School.
One evening she showed up at a Hispanic Alliance scholarship and financial aid night. She was not there for herself. She had come to help.
That is where she found the Student DREAMers Alliance, which she had never heard of. She joined the third cohort.
“What changed about me after being a part of Student Dreamers Alliance, I would say is my leadership. I have become a better leader, and I have taken this with me till this day in my career.”
Yenli Gaytan
SDA runs six leadership seminars across the school year, pairs Fellows with mentors, takes them onto college campuses, and sits with them through FAFSA and college applications. Every Fellow is the first in their family to go to college in this country. For most of them, those seminars are the first time anyone has walked them through the mechanics of how it actually works.
Yenli earned an Associate of Applied Science in Paralegal Studies from Greenville Technical College, then a Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice Law from Limestone University. She works as a bilingual paralegal at a Greenville law firm.
She also came back to Hispanic Alliance, this time on the other side of the table. Yenli serves as Vice Chair of HA’s Legal Team, one of four volunteer community teams that shape how the organization works across education, financial stability, health, and legal access. She knows the legal system as a young Latina who worked through her own family’s immigration history inside it. She is now one of the people deciding how HA responds to families in that position today.
In 2022 the National Association of Legal Assistants named her Student of the Year. She was also named Diversity Paralegal of the Year.
“I was just this morning at Hollis Academy doing Career Day, demonstrating to the next generation what it looks like being in a legal field.”
Yenli Gaytan
