Event Agenda

We are pleased to announce that the 2024 Tri-Unity Conference: Fostering a Sense of Belonging and a Culture of Caring, will be held on Monday, August 19, 2024, from 9 a.m.-2:30  p.m. The goal of the conference is to unite the community through education and provide training by hosting speakers who are experts in their fields of study.

This year, the Aprendamos Family of Services team is honored to host Dr. Laura Rendón as our keynote speaker. Dr. Rendón, a nationally recognized student advocate, scholar, and contemplative educator, will lead us in a keynote session titled, “Showing Up for Our Youth: Employing Validation, Fostering Belonging, and Honoring Cultural Strengths.”

The conference location will be the New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum located at 4100 Dripping Springs Rd., Las Cruces, NM.

To register, visit https://bit.ly/3W1Ik9d. For questions, email Laura Elmquist at lelmquist@aitkids.com.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Laura Dr. Rendón, Keynote Speaker

Dr. Laura Dr. Rendón is a nationally recognized student advocate, scholar, and contemplative educator. Rendón is a professor emerita at the University of Texas-San Antonio and has held faculty and administrative appointments at several universities. She earned a doctorate in higher education administration at the University of Michigan. Rendón grew up in a low-income, single-parent household along the U.S.-Mexico border in Laredo, Texas. Rendón is a passionate advocate for low-income, first-generation students who she feels have hopes and dreams but often do not know how to realize them without proper resources. She is also the author of Sentipensante Pedagogy: Educating for Wholeness, Social Justice and Liberation along with eight other books and monographs and an extensive list of scholarly publications focusing on fostering success for underserved student populations.

Speaker Bio: Dr. David Ortiz, Conference Speaker 

David G. Ortiz is an Associate Professor and Department Head of Sociology, as well as Provost’s Inaugural Faculty Fellow for the Center for Latin American and Border Studies (CLABS) at New Mexico State University. He was born and grew up in Mexico City, MX where he completed his B.A. in International Relations at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He received an M.A. in Peace and Conflict Resolution and his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame. His areas of research interest converge at the intersection of Social Movements, Political Sociology, Latin American studies, Sociology of Disasters, Digital Media Communication, and Research Methods. More recently he has become interested in exploring the barriers and opportunities for minoritized and first-generation students to successfully complete college degrees in STEM fields. He has served as an international observer in elections throughout Latin America, including the 1994 Mexican elections with Alianza Civica, and the 2004 Venezuelan Referendum with President Jimmy Carter and the OAS. In his free time, he enjoys traveling, landscape and nature photography, scuba diving, and Star Wars.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Stephanie Arnett, Conference Speaker

Dr. Stephanie M. Arnett is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at New Mexico State University. Her research focuses on the sociology of education, race and ethnicity, and social stratification, with much of her work focusing on international comparisons, especially in the Latin American region, and factors that contribute to the success of students in higher education.  

Her cross-national research examines how family socioeconomic status, school factors, and the structural characteristics of nations interact in order to produce education stratification, and identifying specific contexts that weaken the relationship between social class and academic outcomes. 

She also serves as Co-PI, Broadening Participation Research Team leader, and lead quantitative researcher on the New Mexico Alliance for Minority Participation (AMP) grant, which focuses on how URM students navigate toward academic success in STEM by exploring the ways in which interactions in educational environments shape student pathways and identities differently based on students’ social positions. 

Register on Eventbrite here.

The Tri-Unity Conference was created 17 years ago. It began as a collaboration between Direct Therapy Services, Aprendamos Intervention Team, and New Mexico State University-Communication Disorders Department. The partners at Direct Therapy Services and Aprendamos Intervention Team felt it was their responsibility to give back to their community and the local university. As practicing therapists, they also recognized that opportunities for education on specific topics were not found locally, and many therapists would travel to hear speakers and continue their education. So together with NMSU they created the conference.

The intention of the Tri-Unity Conference is to unite the community through education and to provide training to our community by hosting speakers who are experts in their fields of study. In doing so, the conference supports NMSU students and faculty. All proceeds from the conference are donated back to an endowment at New Mexico State University, and funds from the endowment provide funding for students and faculty of the NMSU Communication Disorders Department.