First Star youth counselor and TRIO lead mentor leaves legacy of support and advocacy after graduation

Dennis Mendez has worn many hats, but all with one thing in common: his passion for helping people. 

Mendez graduated from Arizona State University in the spring of 2025 with a Bachelor’s of Science in communication. Alongside this achievement, he also racked up an impressive extracurricular resume well before he walked the stage for his diploma. 

“I am a previous TRIO Upward Bound assistant-to-the-director as well as I was one of the youth coaches for them,” Mendez said. “I worked for them for two years, and I currently work for Trio as a teacher, but I also work at Maricopa County in the health center just doing documents. I love helping people, one of the things I've always wanted to do since high school is help people.”

Having moved between three different states and 12 different cities while growing up, Mendez is still an Arizonan at heart, claiming Mesa as his official hometown. Through all this travel, Mendez still insists one of the most dramatic changes in scenery for him was coming to ASU.

“I may have lived in a lot of different areas (Arizona, California, Montana), but they're all very similar in terms of the people that are there,” Mendez explained. “At ASU specifically, I had a lot of friends that were not even from the same planet as me and they're still awesome people. I learned a lot, especially cuisine, specifically because my friends love to cook and I suck at cooking. That's one of the biggest things I took away (from ASU) was people can come from literally any part of the globe and still be amazing people.”

Coincidentally, this wasn’t even the biggest shock that came from Mendez’s experience with coming to ASU, as Mendez wasn’t even sure he was going to be able to attend college to begin with. 

“I was planning on working at In-N-Out forever, and then ASU called me and they

said, ‘Hey, you're in,’” Mendez said. “And I was like, ‘That's great, but I can't afford that.’ Then I opened the login portal, and I had the Obama Scholarship. It was a full-ride scholarship. My grandma actually thought that I was getting scammed. She thought it wasn't real, because who thinks that's real?”

“And it really hit me at that moment. It was like oh shoot, I really can just go to college. So I did.”

This opportunity not only gave Mendez the motivation to enroll in college, it also opened his perspective on an important part of the college experience, assisting students with barriers to entry in enrollment. 

“It’s definitely a life-changing scholarship. I understand a lot of scholarships are based on merit, but this scholarship is based on need, and it's a scholarship that not a lot of people know about, so when they do receive it, a lot of people don't understand it. They don't understand that it is real. It makes ASU attainable for a lot of people that otherwise wouldn’t normally have that.”

This experience helped become a foundation for how Mendez could accomplish his goals while helping others in their journey. Through a follow-up program that helped Mendez get acclimated into his first-year in college, he would find the perfect opportunity to carry this out.

“I worked for First Star as a youth coach,” Mendez said. “It was an amazing experience actually. I got the job because my friend Sam worked there — and I only knew Sam because I was in an ASU program called Bridging Success, which was an early start program. I was only there for a week and a half, but Sam goes, ‘Hey, I think you would love this job.’ He said, ‘I remember when you said that you love helping people, so let's go work.’”

Get to work they did. The two, still very close friends to this day, are premier examples of the supportive community presence at First Star. Mendez in particular has spent much of his time and effort there making sure each student finds their voice and is unafraid to participate.

“First Star is a college readiness program for foster youth that are in high school,” Mendez explained. “Some of these students want to do more and or they don't think that they can do more and we show them that they can.” 

“I worked for First Star until this last September,” Mendez continued. “I helped with activity building, I helped with leading activities and I helped facilitate student growth. I feel like there were a lot of students who were really quiet at first and so, me personally, I really like helping people get comfortable in situations. One of the biggest things for me is I really don't like

when people feel like they don't have a voice in an area.”

Most importantly for people like Mendez, this support does not end in the social circles at any given First Star event. When it comes to providing students with a voice, First Star and its wonderful team of counselors and staff see it as an expansive project that seeks to embed every student with the knowledge and confidence that their voice doesn’t just exist: it is important. 

First Star directly supports pre-college foster youth, an often underrepresented and underprivileged group when it comes to enrolling in higher education. While First Star certainly doesn’t slouch on academic support, they are a holistic organization that focuses on providing students with a wide array of resources from counseling to career preparation to fun outings with community. 

“First Star is a program where every single month for the entire academic year, these students come over to the ASU campus and they have workshops, they have life skills building sessions and even classrooms for them to talk about this stuff in,” Mendez said. “I know for the seniors they are very heavily focused on FAFSA and on applications for college, but we also have events. We've seen Sun's games, we saw the D-Backs game and we even went to the museum of audio where they had these headphones that we walked around with. There's tons of just different events. It’s like your all-inclusive summer program, but all year long.” 

“Then during that two-week specific program, sometimes it's longer or sometimes it's shorter, we really heavily focus on community,” Mendez continued. “We have the students working with each other. They know each other's names. They can tell you this person wants to do this when they're older, or maybe this person currently does this and they want to do this also. It's one of those things where, maybe they felt like they didn't necessarily belong somewhere, and we get to be that place where they do feel like they belong.” 

And as amazing as First Star is, it is just the start, both for the wonderful resources ASU provides to underprivileged students looking to enroll in college and for Mendez's work in helping those students. Mendez also worked in a similar role for the TRIO Upward Bound program at ASU.

“TRIO is very similar in the sense that it is a college readiness program. It focuses very heavily on first-generation youth, be it first-generation Latino or first-generation as in you've

never had a family member go to college. It's one of those things where they also want to build community very heavily, but they focus more on a broader audience. I think it's really important that there is that distinction, because while First Star, we have this very niche group that comes together. With TRIO, I feel like being so broad, it's able to see a lot of perspectives from a lot of students.” 

“They do very similar things over the course of the year and over the course of the summer. Lots of events, lots of curriculum, I would say in TRIO, they do a lot more education-based curriculum. I am currently the English teacher for TRIO over the summer. TRIO acts as a branch toward the in-college programs such as TRIO Student Services. So, if you move from TRIO Upward Bound over into college, it just helps you get a community you're already familiar with and you're able to very quickly connect with a lot of people.” 

In similar fashion to how Mendez got his position at First Star, it was a recommendation from his boss at First Star that got Mendez involved with TRIO. Looking for something to do over the summer, Mendez naturally jumped at the opportunity to be involved with another program assisting students with achieving higher education.

“I was the lead mentor, and that was really fun. I learned a lot of stuff. It was my first lead position ever. I had people that I had to tell what to do. It was so weird, and I had to keep notes for my boss, and I was essentially her assistant just writing down stuff. Literally all I did was make sure that everyone was not only doing their job, but make sure they had fun. You're working for a place that's supposed to be fun.”

While fun is always a priority there, there is one piece that comes before that, and ultimately defines how Mendez and many other counselors like him approach these programs.

“It's support. One of the biggest things is if we're not there, who is? Just getting even one more student to come to ASU, getting one more student to realize they love astrophysics, or maybe they love fashion. This is something that they might not have considered before, and now they're considering it and they have ASU as an option and we pointed them there…  I feel like it's one of the biggest things about why it's so important that we're here, we're just a giant supportive billboard that can get them where they need to be in success.”