About UDG Foundation USA
About the Foundation
The University of Guadalajara Foundation USA is the academic and cultural project of the University of Guadalajara in the United States that promotes the integral formation of the Mexican community and the development of its maximum potential in a multicultural environment.
The UDG Foundation USA operates primarily in the cities of Los Angeles, California and Chicago, Illinois. It is a non-profit organization that takes advantage of the infrastructure and the academic, scientific, and administrative staff of the University Centers that make up the University Network of the University of Guadalajara to promote its extracurricular and online academic proposal in the United States of America through the Virtual University System that offers a variety of courses, as well as high school, undergraduate and postgraduate studies.
The Foundation was established in 2008 as a non-profit organization created under U.S. law as a 501(c)(3) non-profit entity, whose mission is focused on promoting a social or shared cause as it is a scientific, charitable and literary entity, and which is governed by a Board of Directors.
In more than 15 years of history, the Foundation has positioned itself within the Mexican and Latino community as the organization that has connected Spanish-speaking communities on both sides of the border through education, culture, and the Spanish language.
In this way, the Foundation has done its bit to eradicate stereotypes regarding Mexican and Latino identities. Instead, it has shared the great contributions of Latin American culture to the world through gastronomy, traditions, history, art, and literature.
The academic programs implemented have managed to attract the interest of first- and second-generation Mexicans, who had not had the opportunity to access any type of formal education, by providing them with the necessary tools to help them improve their living conditions and strengthen the feeling of pride in being Mexican.
The Foundation's focus on integration and human development in places where Mexicans and Latinos are present has made a difference in international collaboration between Mexico and the United States.
The UDG Foundation USA and its academic, business, scientific-technological, entrepreneurship, as well as cultural diffusion nature, has promoted competitiveness, productivity, mobility, and integration between both nations.
Against this backdrop, the initiative to comply with the fifth stage of the University of Guadalajara Los Angeles (UDGLA) project, which contemplated since its inception in 2008 the establishment of an academic and cultural headquarters of the University of Guadalajara in Los Angeles, in which the Mexican and Latino population would have access to quality education, is strengthened and accelerated. This project is materialized in partnership with Arizona State University (ASU).
The venue chosen for the opening of the headquarters is the Herald Examiner Building, a building built in 1914, from which a major Los Angeles newspaper operated, publishing its last edition in 1989. The building was designed in the Mission Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival styles by architect Julia Morgan and since its construction has been considered a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.
In 2019, about 30 years after the newspaper's closure, ASU announced plans to locate its Los Angeles campus in the building. In 2022, it signed an agreement with the University of Guadalajara and the UDG Foundation USA in order to share a space in which the UDG can provide its academic offer to the Mexican and Latino population.
This alliance with ASU has opened up new opportunities for collaboration, such as the one between the UDG Film School and the Sidney Poitier New American Film School; in addition to the permanent possibility of expanding to the Hispanic community other initiatives such as the Los Angeles Spanish Book Fair and the Literary Festival (LéaLA), programs of the University Network, the GuadaLAjara Film Festival and the Taller del Chucho, among the most relevant projects.
Over time, the Foundation has been assigned other tasks such as administering the Pyrrha Gladys Grodman Educational Trust, an economic fund that mainly promotes Jalisco's artistic talent and supports Mexican and Mexican-American university students to complement their academic training through the granting of scholarships, in addition to promoting artistic and cultural manifestations in Jalisco and the United States.
The University of Guadalajara Foundation USA is the academic and cultural project of the University of Guadalajara in the United States that promotes the integral formation of the Mexican community and the development of its maximum potential in a multicultural and the development of its maximum potential in a multicultural environment.