Conference History
The Indiana Latinx Leadership Conference (ILLC) was established to provide a venue that recognized the educational experiences and challenges Latinxs face in a forum by and for students. The goal of the forum was and continues to be to cultivate the exchange of ideas, values, and beliefs in order to promote scholarship, leadership, cultural awareness and community. Through encouraging further academic inquiry and student development, ILLC's mission is to empower Indiana's college and high school Latinx's. While the conference focuses on Latinx related topics, this conference is open to everyone--not just Latinxs.
For the first eight years, the ILLC was held on the Indiana University, Bloomington campus. In 2008, the ILLC leadership expended through the collaboration between Indiana University and Purdue University to host the conference on the Purdue University, West Lafayette campus. The partnership to cultivate student leadership and academic success has since grown to include other hosting institutions. By expending the partnership and rotating the location of the conference, ILLC hopes to create a strong educational and support network to develop strategies that will result in resolving the challenges of Latina/o educational attainment. Other institutions who have hosted the conference include: IUPUI, Ivy Tech Community College-Valparaiso, Ball State University, Marian University, IU Northwest, IU Fort Wayne, DePauw University, IU Kokomo, IU Southeast and University of Southern Indiana.
Through the support and collaboration of various communities across the state of Indiana, it is our hope to bring awareness to issues relevant and important to Latinx people. We envision the conference as a way for Latinx students from across the state to come together in an academic and professional setting to stimulate or enhance their leadership abilities within their communities. This conference hopes to provide this through insightful workshops, speakers and resources on culture, education, identity, leadership, and mentorship.
The Indiana Latinx Leadership Conference recognizes the diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and ideas that gives strength to the complexity of the intersectionality of identities within the Latinx population. These diverse identities deserve recognition and the understanding of the role they play in dismantling the stereotypes that hinder and hurt our community. Our commitment to this educational effort is not only for Latinxs but non-Latinxs as well. It is our hope that this conference can be a catalyst towards building a stronger community of Indiana Latinxs who can learn from each other, inspire one another, and create a network of mentoring and opportunities.
The hope is to accomplish this by creating a networking, educational, and support setting that would result in cooperation and strategies that will result in resolving the challenge of educating Latinxs.