Announcing our Pipeline to Justice Award Winners from the 2025 application cycle

Read on for information about the Pipeline to Justice Award and our P2J Award winners.

The Social Justice Initiative is pleased to announce the winners of the Pipeline to Justice Award from the 2025 application cycle. This year, we are especially grateful for our donors, whose generosity allowed us to award six UIC undergraduate and graduate students who show dedication to justice work and great promise in their fields of study.

Congratulations to Cynthia Brito, Arseny Acosta Nunez, Amira Altamimi, Hialy Riviera Gutierrez, Whitney Jean Alim, and Mina M. Mari!

The Pipeline to Justice Award was founded in 2012 to support community organizers and activists in completing undergraduate or graduate degrees at University of Illinois Chicago with a one time monetary award. This program is committed to increasing education access for students who are engaged in leadership and activism in national and local justice-based movements. P2J supports students in serving their home communities while pursuing rigorous scholarship, for the benefit of both.

To donate to the P2J Award fund, click here.

MEET OUR P2J AWARD WINNERS

Cynthia Brito
PhD Candidate: Urban Planning and Policy

Cynthia is a Chicago-born writer, researcher, and organizer of Mexican campesino roots. Cynthia's current community work involves co-creating future worlds at the intersections of abolition, radical feminism, mutual aid, and emergent strategy. Cynthia is a PhD Candidate in Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago, studying how cities and communities respond to the polycrisis of our era. Her research expands the mainstream understanding of mutual aid, centering it as a gendered dialectical practice of prefiguration that can put non-capitalist life worlds into practice. She is also a school board member for North Berwyn School District #98. Cynthia's life's work is dedicated to collectively dismantling systems of oppression, changing them, and engaging in liberation-based worldmaking. She is both an autonomous organizer and engages in collective work through various community-based collectives.

Arseny Acosta Nunez
3rd Year Undergraduate: Political Science and Criminology, Law & Justice

Arseny is a first-generation college student studying Political Science and Criminology, Law & Justice. Her work centers on social justice, with a focus on education equity, youth advocacy, and human rights. As Director of Youth International at Women’s All Points Bulletin, she leads initiatives that amplify youth voices and address systemic inequity. Arseny aspires to become an attorney dedicated to advancing civil and human rights and expanding access to justice for marginalized communities.

Amira Altamimi
3rd Year Undergraduate: Interdisciplinary Education in the Arts

Amira Altamimi is a second generation Palestinian from the southwest suburbs of Chicago. Amira is currently pursuing a major in Interdisciplinary Education in the Arts and minors in Global Asian Studies and Global Middle East Studies. Amira works as a community organizer and Youth Organizing Instructor for the Arab American Action Network and as an Oral History, Archival, and Storytelling Senior Program Intern at the Arab American Cultural Center at UIC.

Hialy Riviera Gutierrez
PhD Candidate: Criminology, Law & Justice

Hialy is a PhD candidate at UIC, where her dissertation explores strategic relationships and possibilities across mass movements, state institutions, and alternative institutions. Outside of school, she works as the Deputy Research Director at Political Research Associates, where she supports social justice researchers in grounding and testing their analyses in a political economy strategic framework. Aside from her day job, Hialy is a cooperator in the solidarity economy ecosystem in Chicago, where she is the founder of Justice Cream, a political education ice cream cooperative. Hialy is also a steering committee member of the NYC-DSA political education academy, where she helps to advance education on different expressions and applications of socialism.

Whitney Jean Alim
PhD Candidate: College of Education, Curriculum & Instruction, Critical Pedagogies Program with a concentration in Black Studies

Whitney (she/her) is an educator, organizer, and curricular specialist committed to liberation in education. She is pursuing her PhD in Critical Pedagogies at UIC, where her research focuses on dismantling systems of carcerality and anti-Blackness in K- 12 classrooms. Whitney is a community organizer with Black Youth Project 100 in Chicago, fighting for Black liberation through a Black, queer, feminist lens.

Mina M. Mari
PhD Candidate: Criminology, Law & Justice with a concentration in Latin American and Latino Studies

Mina M. Mari is a PhD candidate in Criminology, Law, and Justice at UIC. Her work analyzes the intersection of youth migration and socio-legal structures, focusing on how systems shape the daily lives and futures of migrant youth. Her work is deeply informed by interdisciplinary approaches that prioritize the voices of marginalized migrants. Through this approach, she examines the strategies migrant youth employ to navigate identity, belonging, and cultural preservation in Chicago. Crucially, her scholarship is informed by her positionality as a member of the Iraqi diaspora and the structural obstacles her family endured as refugees. Mina has worked at several refugee and migrant organizations across Chicago, providing one-on-one academic and social support to youth from diverse cultural backgrounds. Through her professional experience, she discovered that newly arrived youth migrants faced similar obstacles to those she had once faced herself. Her research aims to uncover the common struggles diverse youth migrants encounter and navigate as they come of age in Chicago. Mina continues her advocacy work both on-campus, connecting with several progressive organizations, and off-campus through mutual aid and anti-deportation organizing.