CHELSEA, Mass. — It started with an immigration raid four years ago.
From his Melrose home, Bob Hildreth watched the aftermath of federal immigration agents storming a New Bedford, Mass., leather factory and netting 350 suspected illegal immigrant workers from Guatemala and El Salvador. The event drew national attention when news reports showed the small children of some of the detainees being cared for by strangers.
It also motivated the Boston banker and philanthropist “into action.”
Hildreth, the son of an Irish immigrant and a descendant of the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century, put up half of the bail money for those arrested, roughly $100,000. To his surprise, Latino immigrants in New Bedford and across the state rallied to raise the other half.
Hildreth thought: Could Latino immigrant families also be inspired to raise money for college?
The result was the Boston-based group he founded: Families in Educational Leadership, or FUEL. For more than a year, his group has held “savings circles” in Chelsea, Lynn and parts of Boston with the goal of training low-income immigrant families on financial literacy so they can put away money for college. The group promises that if families save $1,500 by the time a child graduates from high school, the group will match that amount.
“I acted viscerally, from the gut,”‘ says Hildreth, now 60, who sold bonds in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s. “I saw that these immigrants could raise money for bail, that they sent billions of dollars a year in remittances. Why not do the same for college?”
