The Big Apple has given Dr. Aldrin Bonilla so much that now he is the one who wants to return some of that love to the place where he has lived his entire life.
“I love serving New York City,” he said. “It has given me a lot, and I want to do my part.”
Dr. Bonilla is executive vice president of the Fund for New York City, a nonprofit organization that provides grants and loans to government agencies and other nonprofit organizations to improve the quality of life of city residents.
Some of the most notable initiatives of the fund led by Bonilla are the Sloan Awards for Public Service, the Sloan Awards for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching (STEM), and the New York City community planning scholarship program .
“What I like most is celebrating and recognizing excellence,” he said. “We have done it with teachers from [programa] high school STEM, with the city’s public servants and with leaders of non-profit organizations.”
New York is a city with 9 million inhabitants and is the most populated in the country. For Dr. Bonilla, many good things happen with good people.
And it was precisely a good person who inspired him to improve himself and become a doctor in education from New York University. It’s about whoever was in charge of the after-school program in their community. He exposed both Dr. Bonilla and other children in the neighborhood who were Latino and African-American to the best part of New York: art galleries, museums, cultural institutions and theaters, among other iconic places.
Dr. Bonilla is the son of Dominican immigrants; His father was a mechanic and his mother was a factory worker. He grew up in Washington Heights and is convinced that for opportunities to come, “we have to do our part, but above all, not stop fighting for those opportunities.”
“We have to continue fighting for the next generations,” he said. “Because they close if we don’t fight for them.”
