On March 7, 2024, NAFSA Vice President for Public Policy and Practice, Dr. Joanna Regulska presented Chimin Lee Metzler, Loyola Marymount University, with the 2024 Advocate of the Year Award at NAFSA’s Advocacy Day. Below is an edited version of Dr. Regulska's remarks:
Now it is my honor and privilege to announce the NAFSA 2024 Advocate of the Year.
This person has shown a steady commitment to using her voice to advocate for changes that would benefit the international students on her campus and beyond in a variety of ways.
She began her NAFSA grassroots advocacy journey as a first-time participant in Advocacy Day in 2017. In 2019, she made a special trip to Washinton, D.C., joining NAFSA policy staff for in-person meetings on Capitol Hill with members of her congressional delegation who were identified as key to advancing top policies to support international students in this country.
She showed great facility in communicating key messages to her elected officials while highlighting data points and stories drawn from her experience as a former international student herself. Since that time, she has deepened her engagement with her congressional delegation while stepping up to serve as her Region’s advocacy representative in 2022. In that capacity, she played an important role in organizing her peers from the field to join in-person and online advocacy efforts, including leading participants from her region at NAFSA’s Day of Action in 2022.
Her state-level advocacy has been a constant since 2017 as well. She has communicated with her state’s legislative offices and the Department of Motor Vehicles about how conflicting driver license requirements between state and federal agencies negatively affect international students and scholars and how to resolve them. That included working with a state assemblymember, DMV headquarters, her state’s transportation committee and university representatives across her state. She also shared her expertise on this issue with another NAFSA region’s advocacy representative, helping guide similar efforts in their state.
This person has also shown strong and consistent interest in ensuring a broad and diverse community of educators feel welcome under the advocacy tent, serving to identify grant opportunities to facilitate their participation and presenting and training at NAFSA conferences on ways to get involved in advocacy.
For these reasons, it is my pleasure to announce Chimin Lee Metzler as the 2024 Advocate of the Year.