Woman creates app to help ‘Dreamers’ get scholarships
Growing up as an undocumented teenager in Southern California, Sarahi Espinoza Salamanca didn’t feel different from her high school classmates. She spoke English fluently, studied diligently and pretty much led a normal life.
But as she prepared for college in 2008, she learned she couldn’t apply for federal education aid because she lacked legal status. Her counselors told her that, in general, students like her drop out and go to work instead of pursuing a degree.
“It was one of the hardest moments of my life,” recalled Salamanca, now a 28-year-old resident of East Palo Alto.
Years later, Salamanca harnessed her disappointment from that formative experience to launch an idea designed to help others who found themselves in her position. Her mobile app, called Dreamers RoadMap, organizes scholarships that are available locally and nationally for undocumented students across the country.
“Sarahi embodies the traits of a true visionary — someone who lights the path forward so all of us can prosper,” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said. “Her sharp and creative mind developed an app to help undocumented students find scholarships so they could fulfill their individual dreams.”
Salamanca’s parents brought her from Mexico to the U.S. at age 4, crossing the border to live with family members in the Bay Area. At 16, she stayed after her mother and father moved back to Mexico, believing the only path to stability for her family relied on her gaining a good education and eventually a well-paying job.
» “Sarahi embodies the traits of a true visionary — someone who lights the path forward so all of us can prosper. ” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf
When counselors told her she’d get no funding for higher education, she thought her path was closed. Months later, though, a friend told Salamanca about legislation in California that allowed undocumented students to obtain lower, in-state tuition. Soon, she enrolled at Foothill College in Los Altos.
In 2013, Salamanca gained protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The next year, she was a finalist for the Voto Latino Innovators Challenge, a MacArthur Foundation-funded effort to improve life for Latinos through technology.
Her innovation was her app, which prompted one question from the judges: “How are you going to fund it?”
“You guys are going to give me the money to make it,” she said.
They laughed — and granted her the $100,000 prize.
Since its release in 2016, the app has been used by 20,000 people across the country, according to Salamanca.
Over the years, she has been occasionally pulled aside by some of these students — like a woman who recently told Salamanca she’d been able to attend UCLA thanks to money she found through the app.
“That was the whole purpose,” Salamanca said. “If I could change the life of one student — give them that sense of hope to go to college — then that’s a success for me.”