Club Spotlight: Association for Low-Income Exonians
By CARLY CANSECO and WILLIAM INOUE
Every Monday at 7 p.m., in Instructor in Health Shane LaPointe’s classroom, around 12 members of the Association for Low-Income Exonians (ALIE) meet. This affinity space is dedicated to easing the lives of low-income students, who often find it difficult to adjust to a place like Exeter. The club often works with faculty and has dinner with Principal William Rawson once per term.
Aspirations for change encouraged many to join the club. Co-head and upper Mario Meneses said, “I’m part of this club just because I feel like the low-income identity is obscure in people’s minds and not at the forefront of many people’s minds when they think about multicultural affairs.”
“Being low income is often an extra burden in ways that people don’t expect and I didn’t expect when I first came to Exeter,” co-head and upper Erin Chen said. “But by learning about more resources and support syastems through ALIE, I’ve connected with others who’ve had this same ostracizing experience. It makes me feel like I have a community and am not alone in these hardships.”
Meneses added, “I feel like it’s challenging to have these conversations considering the demographic at the school. I think 50 percent aren’t on any financial aid, which means that a lot of people are making a decent amount of money. That means it’s really difficult for some people sometimes to reach out even to their student listeners or their proctors because they don’t know if that’s a conversation that they will be able to facilitate. So I think this club helps fill the gaps left in our community.”
LaPointe, who advises the club, also noted her personal connection to the club. “I also was a student who went to a boarding school and was from a low-income background.”
She continued, “I lived in government housing. My family, at certain points, had food stamps. Frequently, holidays only happened because of social services related to churches, which my family could negotiate and take advantage of. There’s a whole side of when you don’t have enough and have to stretch small things even further.”
Although the club has grown from three members in Chen and Meneses’s prep year to 12 now, Meneses still emphasizes the importance of outreach and recognition for the club. “When I first arrived, I didn’t know about the club until my prep spring, when I started going,” he said. “I was really sad about that because I would’ve gone if I had known about it earlier. So I think my main purpose as a co-head has been to raise more awareness about the club in general.”
LaPointe wishes for more opportunities in the future. “I think using the club as a springboard to help students navigate the resources here on campus is a big piece of it,” she said. “I also would love to be able to support more off-campus trips that get us out into the local community. I think one of the cool things about the club is that it has kids from many different backgrounds. Often, those are kids whose first time is around snow, so we’ve gotten a lot of support from student activities and financial aid to be able to get those kids up to a mountain. But lessons are another level of expense.”
ALIE has grown from just a few members then and now to a dozen people and continues to grow. The club leaders have high hopes that it will expand further in the coming years. LaPointe concluded, “We’re only limited by the co-heads’ imaginations. And every year, I’ve been just blown away by their resiliency and their ability to figure out ways to build a club culture that means something.”
