Alia Fierro hails from the state of Illinois. Her Mexican-American upbringing instilled in her a heightened awareness and deep commitment to social justice issues that face underserved communities in the U.S. and abroad.
Fierro graduated with a B.A. in Latin-American studies and a minor in urban planning from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 2013. Following her undergraduate studies, Fierro went on to work closely with uninsured immigrant and Latino communities and facilitated the implementation of the U.S. Affordable Care Act in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Fierro says this work shed light on the place-based consequences of policy and how that impacts access to resources such as housing, healthcare, and employment, and led her to graduate study at Cornell, where she earned a master of regional planning degree in 2016. Full story
