4 minute read
Senior employs Jesuit values to fight for a stronger, safer community
STORY BY Sara Knuth
The billboard images can be hard to look at: a teddy bear and a gun on a coffin. A gun with the message “Hugs not guns,” in Spanish and English.
But combating gun violence in the southwest Denver neighborhood where Sayuri Toribio grew up isn’t easy, either. Still, the Regis senior is committed to trying.
For two summers, she has been at the forefront of a youth-led effort to create forceful billboard messages that compel viewers to think about the issue. The billboards, funded with a grant from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention, were created with help from the Denver Police Department and Denver City Council President Jamie Torres.
The billboards are just a part of Toribio’s community activism, and just the first steps in what she expects to be a career that blends business with social justice.
Toribio said the teddy bear billboard has been tagged — a sign that people are at least reading the message.
Now, she said, the challenge is to figure out how to progress from getting attention to sparking change. “They're reading the message,” Toribio said. “What are we going to do about it? How are we going to do more? How are we going to interact with those people who don't take the message as well?”
Before she enrolled at Regis, Toribio wasn’t familiar with the Jesuit values that would become central to her college education. But she already was practicing them. From the billboards to a community newsletter she created for southwest Denver, Toribio has dedicated her spare time to improving her community.
So, when she arrived at Regis, thanks to the Business Leadership Scholarship, which covers her tuition, the values of Men and Women for and with Others and Magis already felt like second nature.
“It's like I was already practicing them,” Toribio said. “I just didn't know what to call them or what they were, or I had never meditated on them before.”
Toribio, who studies business administration with a specialization in marketing and a minor in French, has stayed involved with her community. For the past three summers, she has interned with Torres, the city council president, whose District 3 includes Toribio’s neighborhood. As an intern, she helps Torres with community engagement, social media and marketing. In August, Torres acknowledged her work during a Denver City Council meeting that included honoring Regis’ new status as a Hispanic-Serving Institution.
Earlier this year, Toribio’s efforts were highlighted on 9News, and she and her younger brother, Mario, talked about how they are impacted by the high rates of gun violence in their their Westwood neighborhood. “ It affects everywhere we go, whether it’s in our own home, our own street, our own school,” Toribio told 9News.
In 2020, she helped launch the Southwest Vida newsletter, written by youth in both English and Spanish. The newsletter covers topics from mental health to gun violence to immigration. Fifteen young writers contribute each month to the newsletter, which has grown from six pages in its first year to 16 in its latest issue.
Toribio, who will graduate from Regis in the spring, said she hopes to focus on social justice in the nonprofit or business worlds. Her scholarship to Regis made this dream possible, and now, as a first-generation student, she’s passing along all she has learned to her three younger siblings.
