2007 POINT SCHOLARS

Lilia Espinoza

Columbia University

Lilia was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised on Lake Michigan in the East Rogers Park neighborhood. She attended grades 7-12 at Whitney Young High School — the first Chicago Public School to have a Gay-Straight Alliance — where she came out her freshman year. Lilia served as the treasurer of Whitney Young’s GSA her senior year, and helped to organize such events as her school’s Day of Silence/Night of Noise and Coming Out Day. She also participated in the pilot year of Chicago’s Broadway Youth Center’s GLBT Youth Mentor Program. Lilia is a National Hispanic Scholar as well as a National Merit Finalist.

An active member of the Chicago Children’s Choir for ten years, Lilia has sung in several countries and in such venues as Carnegie Hall and Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. Her experience in the choir, a not-for-profit organization founded as an outgrowth of the Civil Rights movement, enabled her to see firsthand the unifying potential of music. Lilia will attend Columbia University in New York in fall 2007, where she plans to continue serving the LGBT community. She especially hopes to work with queer youth who have encountered extreme adversity in both their homes and schools.