Success Story: Meet Alfonso

If you told Alfonso Velasquez 10 years ago that someday he’d be a college graduate working on a laptop in an office, he would not have believed you. The native of Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood was working at a home improvement retail chain, lifting heavy boxes and doing the same kind of blue-collar manual labor he’d been doing all his life.

In my culture and my family, you work in a factory until you’re 60 years old and you die,” explains Velasquez, the oldest of five children.

He might have continued down that path if it were not for his mother, Elena Velasquez, who made a life-changing decision to pursue a degree in early childhood education at
St. Augustine College at Lewis University, graduating in 2007.

It was not easy. While she was working and going to school, my father was injured and lost his hearing in a factory accident,” says Velasquez. “He couldn’t get any work after that, so my mother was the breadwinner for a while.

Inspired by her vision for a better life, he also enrolled at St. Augustine College at Lewis University to pursue a degree that could help him help his community.

Growing up, drugs and gangs were all around me, but I tried my best to stay away from them,” continues Velasquez, who describes himself as half Guatemalan and half Afro-Puerto Rican. “I chose to major in psychology because I want to help guide others and show them there’s more to life than being on the street—to give them hope for a better future.”

Once he made that choice, he was committed to doing as much as he could to learn and grow. With the support of his psychology professors, he flourished—both personally and professionally.

I started getting better jobs as I started going to school. I became an intern at the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission, and right now I’m working at Rincon Family Services as a peer specialist on the track to becoming a case manager,” says Velasquez, who graduated this year with a degree in psychology and is already thinking about “going all the way and getting a doctorate one day.”

He also wants to help his community, citing a lesson he learned about the “stages of life” in Professor Ralph Moore’s development class.

Sometimes it takes a lot of falling down to find out what we’re meant to do in this world, but you get up stronger and better. You learn, and it helps you improve. With those improvements, you can pass on that knowledge,” says Velasquez. “When you come from a lower-income neighborhood, you sometimes think that people are against you, but there are people out here who will help you grow. St. Augustine taught me that, and I can’t wait to help others around me.