Minerva Perez Is the Dan's Papers 2025 Person of the Year

For more than two decades, Minerva Perez has helped redefine what community leadership looks like on the East End of Long Island. In moments of calm and crisis, she has built systems where none existed, stepped into gaps others avoided, and insisted that a healthier, safer region must include everyone.

That work is why Dan’s Papers has named Perez its 2025 Person of the Year.

Perez, 59, is the executive director of Organización Latino Americana (OLA) of Eastern Long Island, a nonprofit she first joined as a volunteer in 2006 and began leading full time in 2016, when the organization had a volunteer board, a modest budget and no paid staff. Today, OLA operates across the East End providing immigration legal services, adolescent mental health support, crisis response, health access, food assistance and policy advocacy that reaches far beyond the Latino community it was founded to serve.

“I’ve always believed you don’t build a healthy community by helping only one group,” Perez said in an interview. “You strengthen the parts of the community that have been overlooked or scapegoated, and that strengthens everyone.”

Perez arrived on the East End in the early 2000s seeking a fresh start after a major life change. With a background in theater and a BFA in drama from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, she initially connected through the region’s arts community, performing at Guild Hall.

What struck her, she said, was the divide between Latino residents and the way they were portrayed in public discourse and policy debates.

“I kept seeing fear,” Perez said. “Fear that made people disappear into the background, even while being integral to how this place functions.”

That realization led her to OLA, where she was welcomed by the organization’s founders and quickly immersed herself in advocacy work, including testifying against proposed Suffolk County legislation that targeted immigrant communities.

The experience, she said, clarified her identity as an advocate — not limited to one issue or population, but grounded in protection, dignity and access.

When Perez returned to OLA in 2016 as its first paid executive director, she took a personal and professional risk that she feels has paid off.

During the first Trump administration, OLA expanded its immigration advocacy and community education work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Perez led the organization through one of its most consequential transformations.

OLA tripled its operations, hiring more than 30 staff members in a matter of weeks to launch Project Hope: Coping With COVID, a New York state initiative providing mental and emotional health support across the East End. The program, originally designed to last six months, continued for two years and served residents in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Perez also oversaw partnerships that delivered food to homebound families, coordinated countywide responses for vulnerable residents and helped distribute $1.75 million in Chromebooks and Wi-Fi access so students could continue learning remotely.

Out of that work came Youth Connect, an adolescent mental health initiative launched in 2022 that now operates in middle schools, high schools and Suffolk County Community College. The program provides counseling, crisis intervention and a bilingual helpline for all youth, regardless of background. It is now funded through the New York state budget for a second year.

“This wasn’t a Latino issue anymore,” Perez said. “Our kids were hurting. Our elders were isolated. You either step in or you don’t.”

In 2023, Perez launched OLA’s immigration legal services program, building a team that includes full-time immigration attorneys and a paralegal to provide low-cost and pro bono representation, work permit assistance and asylum clinics — services that had been largely unavailable on the East End.

In recent years, as federal immigration enforcement has intensified, Perez has also led OLA’s Rapid Response Initiative, known as Operation Stand and Protect. The program alerts community members to suspected federal immigration enforcement activity, verifies information, documents encounters and connects families to legal, financial and emotional support when loved ones are detained.

Perez is careful to frame the work not as political, but as constitutional and communal.

“This isn’t about parties,” she said. “It’s about due process, trust and whether people feel safe enough to call 911, to go to school, to get medical care. It is a disregard for our Constitution, and that’s what makes it different. It’s not about deportation. People are going to get deported if if they’re proven to be doing things they shouldn’t be doing, but there has always been a process for that.”

Her approach has earned trust across sectors, including schools, health systems and local law enforcement, even as she remains outspoken about policies she believes harm community safety.

Under her leadership, OLA has also expanded police department trainings, court monitoring, health transportation for frail and terminally ill residents, youth scholarships and advocacy at multiple levels of government.

Perez’s work has been widely recognized. She was honored nationally in 2019 as an #NBCLatino20 leader, and recognized in 2024 as a Champion of Diversity by Suffolk County Legislator Ann Welker.

She currently serves on the boards of Sag Harbor Cinema and LTV and has chaired Southampton Town’s Affirmative Action Task Force since 2012, helping guide diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in local government.

Despite the accolades, Perez consistently redirects praise to her staff and the community she serves.

But the most rewarding part of it all, according to Perez, is seeing the love that her work brings out of all members of the East End community.

“I’m seeing that people that maybe never would have reached out to OLA, that maybe thought, ‘Hey, I don’t want to help those people that are helping those undocumented people or illegal people,’ or whatever words that they would use. Those people are reaching out to me, and they’re there, they’re confused, and they are staying on a conversation with me, to learn more about the work, and then to offer their support and to volunteer,” Perez said. “And that makes me cry because they have a tremendous love in them, and they’re being used, and we can’t turn people’s love inside out. They love their community, but they’re being told that to love their community, they have to hate this other group of people, and that’s incorrect, and so, it is our job to show that.”