Dalia T. Leon

I attribute my success to community, to all of the people that were present in some shape, way, or form to the overall development of where I'm at today. I'm really foundational in my family, my parents, and my sister, because our manners, our behaviors and ways of thinking stem from home, but also from all the teachers, students, friends, and overall community members that I've engaged with throughout not just the 7 years that I've been working, but also in the development of exploring and defining what kind of leader I'd like to be. I had leaders and people that I went to, not just my parents, that gave me new ways of thinking that made me think beyond disability, beyond immigration history, beyond being a woman. It's kind of like how parents always say it takes a village to raise a child - it takes a village to raise a business, it takes a village to raise your professional persona. I wouldn't have achieved what I had in the past, nor would I achieve what I'm achieving now, and will achieve in the future, had I not had all these connections and people behind me, cheering me on, and giving me the encouragement, and listening to me cry when I was frustrated. They all take part in what Apoyo Leon and me are today.

I had a mentor at one of my legal jobs one time who told me, 'Dreams don't work, Dahlia, unless you do.' When I was young, I found out what the word undocumented meant, and that's when I realized that my immigrant parents were here, but not on necessarily legal terms, and so that motivated me to seek out immigration as a pathway. I was very headstrong about becoming an attorney and wanting to be just like that attorney that helped bring my mom back, just like those paralegals that sat with me and my sister and talked to us and explained to us about what these immigration processes were. Having my mentors say that dreams don't work unless you do really put into perspective that I really do want to be an attorney - that's still a pathway of mine that I'm hoping I can achieve at some point in my lifetime. But for right now, what I'm doing with Apoyo Leon and through the contract work that I'm serving with actual legal service providers is giving me that ability to say, you're right, attorney who gave me this advice. This became because I worked hard, because I spent so much time healing through what I had gone through myself with the immigration process, also being able to serve and work towards my ambitions and my dreams. I think turning from victim to now provider really shifts into perspective that immigration work is difficult, but my faith keeps me going and makes me really want to continue striving and be even more desirable for more opportunities.

As a disabled daughter of immigrant parents, storytelling is super empowering to me - not just plain words of saying first generation, but diving down more into the details of what it meant for you and what did that do to you. You never know who's listening, you never know who's going to be on the other side of the phone that may or may not be going through something directly, but may know of someone else, and just by sharing our stories and being vulnerable, really shifts perspective and can give us a new way of processing and approaching certain situations. I've reached the point of healing where I'm very much like, yeah, that happened, and I say it now as a way of being more optimistic. I'm very centered on storytelling and access and just being encouraging of vulnerability, and encouraging people to be more humanistic in their conversations and ways of thinking, because you never know who could be sitting at the other side of the table. Information should be accessible, information should be at the palm of our hands. Those are amongst the core values that I have in how I approach my clientele with Apoyo Leon, but also overall in candid conversations, how I approach everyone and how I'd like everyone to approach me.