Meet the Core Team
The core group of LADATO is a dedicated group of community advocates and leaders committed to advancing our Latin-America diaspora in Ontario.
Matías de Dovitiis
Matías de Dovitiis is an education advocate and an elected Toronto District School Board (TDSB) Trustee for Humber River—Black Creek, where he served as Vice-Chair of the Finance Committee. A University of Toronto and University of Alberta graduate, he made history as the first Latinx trustee elected to the TDSB in 25 years. Throughout his career, he has championed financial literacy programs, protected arts and special education funding, and founded the nonprofit CONOSER to provide free tutoring, scholarships, and school supplies to lower-income youth in northwest Toronto.
Oscar Vigil
Oscar Vigil is an experienced NGO leader and community advocate with over two decades of dedicated service within the Canadian non-profit sector. As the Executive Director of the Hispanic Canadian Heritage Council (HCHC), he manages strategic initiatives, community development programs, and intergovernmental advocacy to promote and preserve Hispanic cultural heritage across major Canadian municipalities. His extensive NGO portfolio includes directing the Toronto Latin American Film Festival (LATAFF) and spearheading multimedia community journalism projects that champion human rights, civic engagement, and social integration for immigrants.
Juan Carranza
Biography and Picture coming soon
Alice Romo
Alice Romo is a representative of the group PLADO, Parents from the Latin-America Diaspora in Ontario. She is a Toronto-based researcher, educator, and parent advocate whose lived experience deeply informs her academic inquiry into educational equity. As a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s OISE, her research focuses on school discipline, critical quantitative methods, and the impacts of policing on students. Driven by her dual perspective as a scholar and a mother, she actively bridges the gap between academic theory and community reality with over 20 years of community service and activism. She served in the Latinx, Afro-Latin-America, Abya Yala Education Network (LAEN), she was elected Ward 7 representative of the Toronto District School Board's (TDSB) Parent Involvement Advisory Committee (PIAC) and served as a member of the Latinx Special Task Force at the TDSB.
Stelli Dominique
Stelli Dominique is a local community organizer, and currently holds the position of Secretary of Communications in the Latin American, and Caribbean Solidarity Network (LACSN), as well as in the past helped to co-found the Venezuela Solidarity Coalition along with other like-minded community organizers in Toronto. Stelli has helped to organize and plan many community engaged progressive events, and programing to help shine a light on the many contradictions we must live through as Caribbean and Latin American individuals living in diaspora, in order to show what it really means to be in solidarity with your people while often-times being spatially and ideologically displaced.
Derik Chica
Derik Chica is a parent, lead guidance counsellor, and community-labour organizer. He is a co-founder of community groups like Latin American Education Network and Ontario Education Workers United, as well as having been Chairs of several Labour Committees in the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation like Communication and Political Action, Human Rights, and Education Services. He has written and given interviews in media like the Toronto Star, Canada Tonight with Ginella Massa, Education Forum, and School Magazine and works hard to advance equity, human rights, and antiracism initiatives in the public education system.