Meet Our Newest Fellow: Luis Andrés Cassiani Herazo
Meet Our Newest Fellow: Luis Andrés Cassiani Herazo
From the blocks of Cartagena to ours — please join us in welcoming Luis Andrés Cassiani Herazo to the My Block, My Hood, My City family as our newest Community Engagement Exchange (CEE) Fellow.
Luis comes to us through the Community Engagement Exchange Program, a prestigious fellowship of the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, implemented by IREX. For the 2026 cohort, just 160 fellows were selected from a pool of more than 10,000 applicants across over 100 countries — and Luis is one of them, spending his three-month practicum here in Chicago with M3 before returning home to lead a six-month community engagement project in Cartagena.
Who Is Luis?
Luis is a community builder, educator, and advocate for Afro-descendant communities from Cartagena, Colombia. Born and raised in Nelson Mandela, a neighborhood on the city's southeastern side where opportunity is scarce and resilience is everything, Luis is the son of Palenquero parents — descendants of San Basilio de Palenque, the first free Black town in the Americas.
His story starts with a small gift: at ten years old, his mother bought him a one-thousand-peso English booklet — the kind sold on city buses — because the family couldn't afford language classes. Luis taught himself from that booklet. Years later, he was fluent in English and French and teaching English to women and children in underserved neighborhoods across Cartagena, weaving in lessons on self-esteem and African history so his students could see themselves in what they were learning.
A Track Record of Showing Up
Luis earned the prestigious Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship — supported by USAID, the Centro Colombo Americano, and the U.S. Embassy in Colombia — and went on to help design leadership programs across the Colombian Caribbean with Manos Visibles, an organization dedicated to empowering Afro-Colombian communities. Along the way, he completed a master's degree in cultural and audiovisual management — because for Luis, culture isn't a side note. It's the engine.
As Director of the Center for Interinstitutional Relations at the Institución Universitaria Mayor de Cartagena (UMAYOR), Luis built the university's first international exchange programs for students from vulnerable backgrounds and low-income households — opening doors to France, Canada, and now Spain for young people who, like him, started with few of them.
At his current job, Luis also helped design the interdisciplinary curriculum by Colombia's Ministry of Education Afro-Colombian Studies Program, building coursework rooted in the heritage of Palenque. Students learn about San Basilio de Palenque — its history of resistance and its role as a living archive of Black knowledge in the Americas. The course was both an academic initiative and a political act, placing Afro-Colombian history at the center of the institution and amplifying voices that had long been absent from those spaces.
Why This Matters for Our Blocks
Cartagena and Chicago are nearly 3,000 miles apart, but the work is the same: investing in young people, honoring where we come from, and refusing to let a ZIP code — or a barrio — determine anyone's future. Luis has spent his life proving that the block you're born on can be your foundation, not your ceiling.
That's the beauty of the CEE Fellowship: it's a true exchange. During his practicum with M3, Luis brings an international perspective to our work here in Chicago — and when his fellowship ends, he'll carry what he learns on our blocks back to Cartagena to launch a community engagement project of his own. Block to block, hood to hood, city to city — that's exactly what M3 is about.
Welcome to the family, Luis. We're glad you're here.
