Negron-Rios, who is Puerto Rican, was raised in a single-parent household in the Harlem community of New York City, and while she was surrounded by strong and positive female role models, none had gone to college.

“I knew it was an option,” she says. “But I didn’t know how to go about it. It was more important to me to get out into the working world and not be a burden to my mom.”

She had intended to go to college at some point, but life kept getting in the way -- a job loss in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks; marriage; and the birth of her son. In 2004 she and her family relocated to Charlotte for work and to be closer to her husband’s family, a move that resulted in severe culture shock.

“Growing up in New York City, it wasn’t an effort to hold on to my cultural identity because you’re hit in the face with it everywhere you go,” Negron-Rios says of the city’s music, food and densely populated Latino neighborhoods. But it was different in Charlotte, where communities are more spread out and she has to drive 20 miles to find a grocery that carries the products she uses for cooking.

“I cried for the first year-and-a-half,” says Negron-Rios, who now works as an executive assistant at GMAC Financial Services. “I felt like no one really understood me here because there’s not as much of a Hispanic population.”

That began to change in 2007 when she connected with Rosie Molinary, a Latina educator and author who was planning to launch a giving circle that would provide intensive mentoring to middle-school Latinas, along with the promise of funding to help with post-high-school education. Negron-Rios joined the effort and became a founding board member in 2008.

Molinary “allowed me the opportunity to do something that’s bigger than myself and give back to the Latino community,” she says. “When she first presented the idea, it made me think of my grandmother because women in the Hispanic community just make things happen.”