Andres Lopez M’18 said the inspiration for co-founding the Lowell Youth Leadership Program came from a grilled cheese sandwich.
“We based it around a summer program that we went to when we were younger,” he explained. “When I was growing up, I was poor. My family came from Puerto Rico and lived in public housing. We only ate what we could, so when I went to summer camp and they gave me grilled cheese with tomato sauce for lunch, I thought it was the most amazing thing.”
Lopez said he wanted to give that same feeling to local children who grew up in similar circumstances.
“I had an opportunity to be exposed to things I’d never had before,” he explained. “We wanted to recreate that.”
Now, entering its fourth year, the four-week summer camp plans on welcoming 130 local children into its ranks, including campers between the ages of 10 to 16 and junior counselors between the ages of 16 to 18.
In addition to a full day of sports, art and music, campers are taught soft skills like building healthy relationships and how to be assertive. Sixteen local restaurants provide breakfast and lunch.
Lopez has worked with children throughout his professional life. After earning his bachelor’s degree in exercise physiology from UMass Boston, Lopez landed a job as a physical education teacher at Lawrence Public School’s Spark Academy.
“It’s a school-based around physical education,” he explained. “They offer kids two courses of gym throughout the week. The idea is if you get kids moving at a certain intensity, their academic performance would increase. I loved the model.”
He also liked the LPS’ close working connection to Merrimack. Lopez said he was looking to advance his career, and the only way he felt he could accomplish that was by earning a master’s degree.
In 2017, Lopez enrolled in Merrimack’s health and wellness management master’s program. The program checked all his requirements – it was close to his work, it worked around his schedule and it was accelerated. He graduated the following year.
“My capstone was how to use accelerometers and technology to improve physical activity in children,” Lopez explained. “Since I was a P.E. teacher, I had the space and the access. We tracked the kids’ information and had them answer questions at the end. We were finding correlations to see what made kids move.”
Lopez now works as the health teacher for Lowell Public Schools.
