Alfredo Velasco Arce has thirty-five years of professional and personal experience in the fields of community organizing, administration of social service agencies, substance abuse, teaching and social research. Between 1967 and 1970, he was a Peace Corp Volunteer, living and working in squatter settlements in Esquintla, Guatemala. He began working in the barrios of San Diego in 1965 and continues this community involvement. He has been the Principal Investigator in a number of studies on drug addiction, the spread of HIV/AIDS amongst Latino/Chicano drug addicts, community revitalization, and undocumented immigration and its effect on county social services. Dr. Velasco Arce worked with the National Crime Prevention Council (Washington, D.C.) on several occasions, assisting them with appropriate language and cultural translations on their "McGruff" school workbooks series. He further assisted the NCPC with the "Scruff" comic book focus groups in Fort Worth, San Diego, Tucson and Washington, D.C. Recently, he was an evaluator for a SAMHSA-funded project to study the implementation of the exemplary practice, Wraparound, in the Latino children’s mental health system in San Diego. With a Ph.D. in Anthropology, he is presently teaching at San Diego State University in the Chicana/Chicano Studies Department and at Springfield College (San Diego Campus) while continuing to work in the Spanish-speaking communities through the Chicano Federation (facilitator of the Leadership Training Institute) and the MAAC Project (consultant to COSSMHO in Washington, D.C.)