HELPING
2019 Graduation from HCCC. Photo by HCCC
Panacea Alliance By Tara Ryazansky Photos Courtesy of Diego Villatoro
T
he idea for Panacea Alliance came about after founder Diego Villatoro volunteered for a Hackensack River cleanup. “Some friends and I were talking about there needing to be more of a spirit of stewardship and a commitment to our local community,” he explains. “We wanted to do something more centered towards
our communities here in Hudson County.” Villatoro is a Bayonne newcomer. He is originally from Honduras and grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada. “I moved to New Jersey for school,” Villatoro says. He is currently a graduate student at Rutgers-Newark, where he studies economics. “I feel that this is interconnected with what I’m studying. For example, one of the specific fields of economics that I’m looking into is urban economics and part of that is our local green spaces and how they help us generally have a better life in
Diego teaching an informal class
urban settings,” Villatoro says. “Here in our Bayonne local parks, the big one and the one closest to where I live around 16th Street, you can go there on just about any day and the shoreline does not look good. “I understand a lot of people bring up concerns like how is this really making a change. Some people may say, ‘Why are you wasting time doing something like that?’ We think that it’s important to get as much plastic away from the shores because it’s where our wildlife lives. All of this plastic is getting broken away and it’s coming back into our water system. The more that we get out of our water system, the better it is for us.”
A Need to Serve Villatoro has always been driven to help. “After I finished high school, I didn’t think college was for me. I didn’t think I was smart enough. I didn’t think I could make it or anything. So I thought, you know, I want to do something with my life. As an immigrant, I felt like I wanted to give back to the country that had adopted my family and me so I saw
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