Diana Alvarado

Diana is a proud Ecuadorian-American, first-generation college graduate born and raised in Queens, New York. Through her time in the public, private, and parochial school systems, she began to witness the foundations and manifestations of education inequity and was fortunate enough to experience the empowerment of mentorship in supporting her goals of going to college. Early on, she knew she wanted to pay that support forward in a scalable way.

She was the first in her family to attend a 4-year university, graduating this past June with a double major in Cognitive Science and Italian Studies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. While in Hanover, Diana was determined to break out of the Ivy League bubble and support the greater Upper Valley community through various projects sponsored by Dartmouth’s Center for Social Impact, and made it a point to support other incoming first-gen college students through their transitions to Dartmouth.

Before joining the lab, Diana spent two years serving as the student director of the Strengthening Educational Access with Dartmouth (SEAD) program, supporting three different Upper Valley high schools’ first-generation students in their college search process. In this role she learned the importance of not only equipping students with the right skills to get into college, but also instilling the resilience and self-advocacy skills that help students thrive in college. Diana also spent meaningful time working at the Colorado-based college access organization Access Opportunity, New York-based leadership education program Prep for Prep, and the Minnesota-based education policy effort The Page Amendment.

Diana’s passions lie in tackling educational inequity from novel angles, creating engaging and active classroom dynamics that are different from traditional K-12 teaching, and making nonprofit work as accessible as possible and inclusive of students, school communities, and families. Diana believes not just in “doing good”, but in “doing good well” which includes showing up consistently and embodying values that are steeped in community and care. She looks forward to “doing good well” at the Ed Equity Lab.