For Elizabeth Sanchez, the work begins with listening.
Long before she began pursuing a doctorate in social work, Elizabeth understood the power of stories. Growing up in Lennox, California, the daughter of immigrants, she heard firsthand accounts of hardship, resilience, and survival. Her grandfather, who had participated in the historic Bracero Program, shared stories of migration, labor, violence, and perseverance. Those stories stayed with her, shaping how she came to understand both her community and the systems that affect it.
Today, Elizabeth is nearing the completion of her doctoral work in Social Work at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on immigrant families navigating structural barriers created by restrictive immigration systems. Yet her work goes beyond studying these experiences. Elizabeth is helping rethink how research itself can be conducted, centering the voices of the communities whose stories are too often filtered through outside perspectives.
“I was always fascinated by storytelling,” Elizabeth reflected. “My parents and grandparents held stories with a lot of care. I hope that today I’m able to honor these stories.”
Roots
Lennox is a community that has always had to fight for itself. Hemmed in by freeways, adjacent to one of the busiest airports in the world, and unincorporated (meaning it has no city government of its own), it has long been a place where resources are scarce and outside investment limited. Yet it has also cultivated something harder to measure: a dense, resilient network of families and neighbors who look after one another precisely because they cannot always rely on institutions to do so.
Growing up here gave Elizabeth an early education in what collective care actually looks like: not as an academic concept, but as a daily practice.
At Lennox Middle School, Elizabeth served as a peer mediator, helping fellow students resolve conflicts and find constructive solutions. Even then, she was learning how to listen carefully, navigate difficult conversations, and help people feel heard.
Armando Franco was Elizabeth’s teacher at Lennox Middle School before later joining the LumenSparQ board. He remembers her clearly. “As a 7th grader, Elizabeth stood out as a kind and conscientious young girl who was always willing to help,” he said.
After graduating from Ánimo Leadership High School in Lennox, Elizabeth continued her education at the University of California, Irvine, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Chicane/Latine Studies. During this time, she encountered the concept of critical consciousness, a framework developed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in his influential book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The idea encourages students to understand the social and historical forces shaping inequality and to develop the awareness necessary to challenge those systems.
For Elizabeth, these ideas resonated deeply with her own lived experiences and the stories she had heard growing up. They helped frame the connection between personal narratives and larger structural forces.
From Social Worker to Scholar
After completing her undergraduate studies, Elizabeth returned home to Lennox and began working in Early Head Start programs that supported young children and their families. The work deepened her commitment to community-centered support and ultimately led her to graduate school.
At the University of Chicago, she earned a Master’s degree in Social Work and began working as a therapist and social worker with immigrant families. Her work focused on supporting individuals and families navigating the emotional stress and uncertainty often associated with immigration systems.
Eventually, Elizabeth returned to Los Angeles and continued working as a therapist with immigrant families and then pursued her doctoral studies. Her experiences as a practitioner became deeply intertwined with her academic work, shaping the questions she wanted her research to explore.
Christine Franco, LumenSparQ board member, was Elizabeth’s 4th-grade teacher and later her Peer Mediation teacher at Lennox Middle School. Their connection didn’t end there. As Christine transitioned from teaching to graduate school in social work, she found their relationship had shifted: “Elizabeth was now the teacher. When we met, I often asked her advice about how best to support our Lennox community.” That evolution culminated in a moment Christine describes as one of her proudest — using Elizabeth’s own research paper, Y el luto sigue (and the grief continues): Latinx immigrants’ experiences of ambiguous loss in the age of restrictive immigration policy, as a source in her own graduate work.
Elizabeth’s professional experiences also expanded internationally. She served on the board of a nonprofit organization in El Salvador that provided therapeutic support, mental health services, and resources for women entrepreneurs and families. The organization was led by a colleague she met during her master’s program, and the experience offered another perspective on how communities shape programming and support one another.
“Working outside the U.S. was incredibly formative,” Elizabeth said. “It was a joy to get to know the families there, and it shaped how I think about community support and healing.”
Reimagining Research With Communities
At the heart of Elizabeth’s doctoral work is a research approach known as community-based participatory action research, often abbreviated as CBPR. Unlike traditional academic research models, where researchers study communities from a distance, CBPR invites community members to collaborate in designing the research itself.
Instead of being treated as subjects of study, community members help shape the questions, methods, and interpretation of the research.
Elizabeth took this approach even further by co-constructing her dissertation with a coalition of immigrants. Together, they created a series of gatherings designed to foster dialogue, reflection, and healing. These gatherings include charlas and pláticas, individual and group conversations where families share experiences, discuss issues they identify as important, and explore ways of supporting one another.
The sessions often incorporate mindfulness exercises and creative practices, recognizing that healing can take many forms. Elizabeth describes the framework she developed as a non-Western critical Chicana feminist approach to community-based participatory action research, rooted in cultural knowledge and lived experience rather than imposed academic structures.
“The families choose the topics that are discussed,” Elizabeth explained. “The community guides the next steps.”
This approach addresses an important challenge within traditional social science research. Historically, many studies about immigrant communities have been conducted by researchers who do not share the cultural, communal, or linguistic backgrounds of the people they study.
Elizabeth believes that when research is shaped alongside the communities it seeks to understand, the results become more meaningful and more accurate.
“Families shape truth over the state narrative,” she said. “Their testimonies are rooted in their own lives, filled with pain and hope at the same time.”
She also challenges simplified portrayals often seen in mass media narratives about immigration.
“The dominant narrative is often portrayed as immigrants are simply running away from immigration enforcement,” she said. “But their life trajectories are multidimensional.”
Healing Through Story and Art
Elizabeth’s research is currently in its data analysis phase, but the process will not end with a written dissertation. In keeping with the principles of community-based research, the families will also help interpret the findings.
Two upcoming community forums will bring participants together to collectively reflect on the data and contribute to the meaning-making process. From there, the project will culminate in a community gallery walk, where families will present artwork created during the research process.
Through visual expression, participants are exploring their experiences, hopes, and visions for the future.
“The power of artwork is incredible,” Elizabeth said. “It’s another way to tell stories.”
The event will invite families, neighbors, and supporters to witness the creativity and resilience that often remain unseen in public narratives about immigrant communities. For Elizabeth, the gallery walk represents more than the conclusion of a research project. It is an opportunity to honor the voices and experiences of the families who helped shape the work.
Strength, Resistance, and Hope
While Elizabeth’s work is deeply hopeful, it is also grounded in the realities facing many immigrant communities today. The possibility of deportation, family separation, and legal uncertainty continues to affect the lives of many families.
“The real threat of state-sanctioned immigration violence keeps me up at night,” she said.
At the same time, the strength she sees in these communities continues to inspire her work.
“What gets me going in the morning is the strength, the lucha, the resistance against oppressive systems, and the hope that families hold for a better future.”
Elizabeth believes one of the most powerful things communities can offer one another is the opportunity to be heard.
“To have a space where people can be heard, even for a moment, is important,” she said. “A community that knows it is not alone becomes empowered.”
A SparQ for Community-Centered Change
As Elizabeth approaches the completion of her doctoral work, she hopes to continue this work as a professor. Teaching at the university level would allow her to train future scholars and social workers while continuing to conduct community-centered research that elevates the voices of immigrant families.
“I see this as a lifelong trajectory of support,” she said.
Elizabeth Sanchez embodies the spirit of a SparQ: a young leader whose work is rooted in service, scholarship, and community empowerment. From her early days as a peer mediator at Lennox Middle School to her doctoral research reshaping community-based scholarship, she has remained deeply connected to the communities that raised her.
Her work reminds us that the most powerful stories are not told about communities.
They are told with them.
Supporting the Next Step
Elizabeth plans to host the community gallery walk later this year once the community forums are complete. The event will provide participating families an opportunity to present their artwork, share their stories, and celebrate the collective work they have done together.
Support for this effort would help provide materials for the artwork, food for families attending the event, and compensation for the parent presenters whose voices and experiences helped shape the project.
The research may have begun as a doctoral project, but its true purpose has always been something larger: creating space for families to tell their own stories, in their own voices, and to be seen not only for their struggles, but for their strength, creativity, and hope.
Those who wish to support this effort may make a donation to LumenSparQ and designate their contribution for Elizabeth’s community research project. These funds will directly support the families participating in the gallery walk and related community events.
For Elizabeth, ensuring that the parents are recognized and supported is essential. The gallery walk is not a conclusion. It is a continuation, one shaped, as the research itself has been, by the families at its center.
“There are dreams,” she said. “There is hope.”