Maria Fe Andrea Lazaro

Maria Lazaro is a recipient of a Fellowship from the Marcy Migdal Fund for Educational Equality. The award supports exceptional students engaged in activities aimed at enhancing access to education for vulnerable students, either locally or throughout the world, and helping them succeed in their education. Click here to learn more about the Marcy Migdal Fund. 

Maria’s formative years were spent in the Global South– from the vast rice fields of the Philippines to the tropical beaches of Saipan, a small US-territory island in the Western Pacific. She comes from a working class, mixed-status immigrant family and was the first to move to the continental United States and attend higher education. Her lived experiences taught her how inaccesible education really is for historically marginalized communities. This is what inspired her to study Education at the University of Washington. She was active in multiple student organizations that work towards expanding access to equitable education. For four years, she served with Jumpstart, a non-profit that aims to close the opportunity gap in Early Education and was also heavily involved in the Pacific Islander Student Commission’s high school outreach efforts. Maria believes that education is a critical tool for social liberation and should be accessible to all, especially to those who have been systematically oppressed.

In 2019, Maria graduated with her Bachelors in Early Childhood and Family Studies and now works with Tiny Trees– the largest outdoor preschool in the nation– to change the narrative around access to the outdoors and reclaim the connection to nature for Black, Indigenous, and Families of Color.