2024 Summer Bridge Theme

Frida Pineda Alvear was born in San Diego and raised in the historic and wondrous southeast San Diego community of Paradise Hills. A proud alumna of Bell Middle School and Morse High School, Frida went on to earn a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Bachelor of Arts in Ethnic Studies from University of California, San Diego, and a Master of Arts in Education with a concentration in Multicultural Counseling from San Diego State University. A fiercely dedicated and well-respected educator, counselor, mentor, crafts artist, activist, and community organizer, Frida created opportunities and sustained possibilities for loved ones, students, peers, and fellow community members to labor for social justice and to build a better future. Frida was a visionary who consistently showed up and held safe and empowering space for the underrepresented and the unheard.

Frida transformed communities through various efforts at University of California, San Diego such as OASIS Summer Bridge, Kaibigang Pilipino, Kamalayan Kollective, Student Promoted Access Center for Education and Service (SPACES), and Center for Student Involvement. In all aspects of her life, Frida continued to champion the values of justice, equity, and representation. Frida's expansive love and tireless commitment to community empowerment lives on through her husband, Carlo Manuel Alvear, their three beautiful children, and a vast family and community of friends, collaborators, colleagues, and all those who were blessed by Frida's humble and profoundly inspiring presence.

“Community means finding your people who ground and uplift you.

Community is present with you through all the highs, lows and everything in between.” 

- Frida Pineda Alvear

Cecilia Ubilla was a daughter, a cousin, a friend, a mother, a scholar, a woman, a truth teller and a proud Chilean. In her young adulthood, many of these titles and benefits were stripped from her by a brutal dictatorship that befell Chile. Cecilia started as a graduate student and political refugee at UC San Diego in 1974 and joined the staff of OASIS with the language and writing program. Helping thousands of students gain the confidence in their writing skills to pass the university’s writing requirement, Cecilia was also an active advisor for the Committee for World Democracy and Project YANO (Youth & Non-Military Opportunities). A lover of books, music, dark chocolate, and freedom, Cecilia’s legacy will live on in the hearts and minds of countless individuals she stirred with the passion of freedom and optimism in the youth of today and tomorrow.

“I am an incurable optimist. There is no remedy. I know that I will not see the changes that I would like to see in my lifetime, but I am not thinking of myself. I am thinking of the generations of young people. I am an absolute believer in the dignity and nobility of the human being.” 

- Cecilia Ubilla