On Following Your Path with Laura Tejeda

Listeners, we're back this week with Sarah Lowe and Adrián Escárate.
Sarah E. Lowe is the Director of Research + Impact at Define American and a Ph.D. candidate in Health Promotion and Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Both a health equities communications researcher and practitioner, she has over twenty years of experience crafting cross-platform media campaigns for The Walt Disney Company, Nintendo, Cigna, PBS, and Discovery Channel. She has also been at the forefront of launching large-scale netroots movements in conjunction with arts-based nonprofits including American Promise, Question Bridge: Black Males, and Land of Opportunity. Sarah holds a bachelor’s in English from Wittenberg University, a master’s in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California, and is currently finishing her dissertation research, a mixed methods study called, “American Dreaming,” exploring resilience and post-traumatic growth in undocumented storytellers who use their personal narratives for immigration advocacy.
Adrián Escárate is the deputy chief of staff at Define American. He has been an immigrant rights advocate for over a decade, initially getting involved in the undocumented youth movement push for the federal DREAM Act in 2010. As a DACA recipient and storyteller, he has vast experience sharing his story with media at the local and national level, including television, newspapers, and podcasts, in support of immigrant rights and immigration reform. Adrián holds an M.A. in Communications specializing in Electronic Media and B.A. in Communications Arts from St. Thomas University. He is also a certified professional tennis coach with more than a decade of experience coaching high performance junior and college tennis players.
During this episode we talked about:

• 07:58 - How Sarah came into this work
• 10:28 - Growing up in a bubble
• 13:41 - Parasocial contact theory
• 14:37 - Adrián's immigration story
• 14:51 - Finding out he was undocumented
• 18:57 - Change the culture to change the policy
• 28:12 - The Roadmap to Resilience for Undocumented Storytellers report
• 31:33 - Changing structures
• 34:34 - Learnings and recommendations
• 40:30 - Everyone should be paying
• 43:38 - The future of the research