Iliana Perez
Executive Director, Immigrants Rising
Iliana G. Perez, Ph.D. serves as the Executive Director of Immigrants Rising, an organization that empowers undocumented people to achieve their educational and career goals through personal, institutional and policy transformation. Dr. Perez is also a lecturer in the Labor Studies Department at UCLA and the School of Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate University, where she teaches courses on immigration, research design, big data, and their connections to social justice.
For over a decade, Dr. Perez has pioneered efforts to empower and support undocumented entrepreneurs through resource development, training, and ecosystem building across the U.S. In 2020, Dr. Perez played a significant role in shaping the SEED program—a multi-million dollar initiative aimed at offering entrepreneurship education, financial support, and technical assistance to immigrant entrepreneurs throughout the state of California. In 2021, Dr. Perez successfully secured a $5.4M SEED grant, with the aim of scaling their entrepreneurship endeavors, and subsequently obtained an additional $2M in funding in 2022. Through SEED, Immigrants Rising has offered entrepreneurship training to over 1,700 individuals and has disbursed over $5M in micro grants to more than 1,000 immigrant entrepreneurs.
Dr. Perez's research has focused on immigrant entrepreneurs, the occupational and educational attainment of immigrant students, and economics of immigration; her work has been published in academic journals, chapters in books, technical reports and online publications. Her Ph.D. dissertation analyzed the determinants to pursue entrepreneurship, characteristics, and the economic returns of Latinx millennial undocumented entrepreneurs.
Dr. Perez immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico with her family to the U.S. at the age of eight. She grew up in the California Central Valley and was undocumented for 27 years before adjusting her status. Iliana holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Fresno State, a M.A. in Economics and a Ph.D. in Education Policy from Claremont Graduate University.
Panel Information
STRATEGIC ADVOCACY - Turning Struggles into Strength: How to Strategically Advocate for Change
4:00 PM
This session is all about strengthening youth advocacy—especially among Latino youth—to make it more powerful, visible, and effective in the face of the urgent challenges of the past few months. From attacks on immigrant rights to the widening health and wealth gaps, our communities are under pressure that demands bold civic action. Yet too often, that action is misdirected, unnoticed, or ineffective—not because the passion isn't there, but because the tools and strategies are missing. This session aims to fix that. Facilitators will train participants on how to effectively engage administrators and legal authorities, amplify their voices through media, and transform lived experience into strategic influence that creates real impact. The session will also focus on how to advocate in professional spaces that may not always be inclined toward advocacy, ensuring that participants can create change even in challenging environments.