Lisa Maria Rhodes
ALAS

Personal Bio

Lisa Maria Rhodes, LMSW, is in year 19 as an educator in New Orleans. A graduate of the University of Miami, Lisa Maria serves as the Director of Alumni Mental Health for Collegiate Academies Next taught at Abramson Sci Academy in New Orleans East and was a social worker at George Washington Carver. With experience working for Orleans Public Defenders and doing national immigration policy advocacy, Lisa Maria founded and is now the Executive Director of non-profit organization ALAS. Lisa Maria founded New Orleans’ young Colombians group Reunión de la juventud colombiana and the NOLA Educators Support Immigrant Students network.

Project Description

ALAS is currently an organization scaling from a program to assist youth impacted by immigration and criminal courts at one school to an organization providing a suite of services featuring youth as expert trainers for educators that are learning how to better support their students impacted by either court system.

While our programmatic excellence with youth and educators has been soaring, our operational sustainability is missing.Through the Roddenberry Fellowship, ALAS is eager to learn and implement strategies, structures, and practices to create organizational effectiveness and sustainability so we can have a solid foundation from which we scale to other schools, districts, cities, and states.