2023 UDALL Scholarship Awardee: Regina Loayza
by Astrid Coste Undergraduate, B.A. in Journalism
Qué Pasa, OSU Staff Writer 23′-24′
We at Qué Pasa like to take the time to highlight our fellow peers and their achievements in their academic and professional development. Regina Loayza is a third-year undergraduate studying Environmental Policy and Decision Making with a minor in Andean and Amazonian Studies. She has been recently awarded the 2023 Udall Undergraduate Scholarship from the Udall Foundation.
The Udall Foundation, founded in 1992, is an organization focused on providing various scholarships, internships, and other programs to college students who are passionate about the environment and the rights of indigenous communities in America. Regina shared that she found out about the program through a newsletter email and her intrigue led her to discuss the opportunity with the fellowship’s office.
Regina Loayza (left) and peer Alex Davis (right) recieving the 2023 Udall Scholarship. Loayza is
an Environmental Policy and Decision Making
major.
With the scholarship award came the experience of participating in the Udall Scholars five-day conference held last August in Tucson, Arizona. Regina’s experience of the conference was as she expected, working together in groups, learning more about Native policies, and speaking with Native leaders in the Arizona Indigenous communities. Her main takeaway from the conference was learning how non-Native students, such as herself, can be allies and incorporating more native awareness in their future careers. There were concerns that were brought up from Native student participants of the conference on how the workshops that taught Native history were leaning more insensitive as it was not mindful of the experience of every Native tribe. Regina explains that it was very honest to be able to have those conversations with the Native student participants as it allowed her to see their perspective on the issue.
“Even if you think you understand, you might not,” she says.
Allyship for the Native community, as she describes it, is the willingness to listen to those members of the community while also acknowledging the reluctancy they might have in receiving our help due to the mistreatment and diminishment they have historically experienced. She does acknowledge that the Udall Foundation did receive the feedback of the students well and that they were taken seriously moving forward.
Regina wants to take her experience with the Udall Foundation and apply it to her current work in advocating for farm workers and sustainability efforts in the environment.
Regina had previously interned in the U.S. Senate in Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. At first, she struggled to make the connection between the work she wanted to do with the environment and how agriculture impacts her work, but she quickly realized that “agriculture was the backbone of everything,” and allowed her to appreciate it and the work of farm workers a lot more than she did before. Ohio State is a city-based university, as Regina recognizes, so advocacy for farm workers is not as prevalent as it would be in rural areas in Ohio, though that does not diminish the need for the need of advocacy. Regina strives to achieve this in her position as Deputy Director of Community Relations in OSU’s Undergraduate Student Government.
Her work in the student government reflects her advocacy as she tries to find ways to best support the students of farm workers and how the university can advocate for those students and their families. Regina wants to expand her advocacy through law school, though she is unsure of the direction she wants to take in her law career.
As she puts it, the Latinx community “know each other best”
so whether it would be advocating for farm workers’ rights through a non-profit or going up against big oil industries, her future plans will keep in mind her Latinx community as well as the indigenous communities here in the United States.