Congratulations to our 2021 Scholarship winners!
On Sylvia’s birthday, we’re proud to announce the two inaugural recipients of the Sylvia Bracamonte Memorial Scholarship. The scholarship committee, which included Sylvia’s family and close friends, were impressed with these incredible women and their accomplishments. We believe Frances and Nataly’s stories and work embody Sylvia’s passion, her love of learning, and her commitment to justice.
Congratulations to our 2021 scholarship winners!
Happy Birthday, Sylvia!
Frankie Free Ramos is from Yauco, a small country town in Puerto Rico known for its coffee, lush green mountains, and red-orange clay earth. She has lived in the Bay Area since first moving to Berkeley for undergraduate studies.
After obtaining a teaching credential and Masters in Teaching from USF, Frankie worked for more than 10 years as a high school teacher and college counselor in Oakland. In 2014, she started a Ph.D. program in the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education, where she examines and engages in community organizing against neoliberal reforms in Oakland, particularly the move to close schools and privatize public education. She does this through a critical, intersectional, and transdisciplinary framework that is attentive to the long history of Black and Brown struggles for educational justice and liberation. Ultimately, she seeks to understand what decolonizing and abolitionist movements require in the current moment to attain radical social transformations and how she will contribute to these efforts as a mother, organizer, and engaged scholar.
Frankie has three children who currently attend Oakland public schools, and enjoys relaxing at the beach, walking amongst redwoods, traveling with her family, and spending quality time with her friends and chosen family.
Nataly Del Cid is a first-generation student who was born and raised by a Mexican-Guatemalan family in South East Los Angeles and moved to the Bay Area to pursue her Bachelors Degree at UC Berkeley.
As an undergraduate student, She interned at residential mental health facilities in the East Bay and Accra, Ghana. She has a multitude of experience in empowering low-income communities of color towards healing and socioeconomic mobility through providing direct services, educational tools, and trauma-informed care. Recognizing how interdependent financial stability and mental health are in low-income communities of color, Nataly decided to enter the social work field to help dismantle any barriers and systems that viciously perpetuate intergenerational poverty and consequently, mental distress and trauma in these communities. After graduating with a BA in Psychology, she joined Rubicon Programs, an economic empowerment program in Richmond, CA. As an Impact Coach, she provides social work services to low-income families and formerly incarcerated community members seeking to gain self-sufficiency and break the cycle of poverty within their families.
Nataly is excited to return to UC Berkeley as a graduate student in their Masters in Social Welfare program with a specialization in Advancing Health and Well-Being Across the Adult Lifespan. She is a Latinx Center of Excellence in Behavioral Health (LCOEBH) Stipend Recipient and is looking forward to further developing and expanding her practical skills in delivering culturally relevant and trauma-informed intervention methods for the Latinx community in the East Bay. She is pursuing a License in Clinical Social Work (LCSW) to provide mental health services in community-based healing spaces that center Black, Indigenous, and People of Color’s conceptualization of wellness and healing justice. She is a current student at McKinnon Body Therapy Center working towards obtaining her license in massage therapy (LMT). She seeks to utilize her LCSW and LMT to integrate talk therapy with bodywork therapy into the holistic healing tools she can offer to these respective communities, hoping these tools can help guide their journey of self-empowerment and intergenerational healing. Her goal is to help these community members become agents of their own well-being, heal individually and collectively, to become agents of real systemic change.
