On the 43rd episode of Immigration Today!, Angeline Chen welcomes Dr. Pierre R. Berastain. Dr. Pierre Berastaín is the Interim Executive Director of the Centre for Public Impact. The Centre for Public Impact (CPI) was founded in 2015 as a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to improving the effectiveness of governments and public institutions worldwide. Dr. Berastaín joined the CPI team as Regional Director for North America in 2023. In 2024, he became the Interim Executive Director of the organization. Dr. Berastaín is also the Co-Founder at Caminar Latino – Latinos United for Peace and Equity, a culturally specific, national organization dedicated to working with Latino families affected by domestic violence. Prior to Caminar Latino, he was the Chief Strategy & Operations Officer for the District Alliance for Safe Housing, the District of Columbia’s largest housing provider for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. His work has appeared in national and international publications and books, including the Huffington Post. From 2015 – 2018, he served on the board of MERGE for Equality, an organization that works to engage men around violence prevention. He is one of the founders of Latinos United for Peace and Equity; and served on the Board of Directors for Transition House, a domestic violence shelter and social justice organization in Cambridge, MA. He currently serves on the board of directors for ImmSchools, an organization that focuses on supporting immigrant students by ensuring schools are safe environments.
In 2019, Dr. Berastaín was named Top 25 Most Influential LGBTQ People of Color in Boston. Originally from Peru, he immigrated to the United States with his family in 1998 and remained an undocumented immigrant for 14 years until he received DACA in 2012 and later became a lawful permanent resident. Dr. Pierre R. Berastaín holds a B.A. in Social Anthropology from Harvard College, a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, and a doctorate in Public Health (DrPH) from the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
From his former work advocating for survivors of domestic and sexual violence, Pierre now focuses on impacting systems and Federal government entities through the lens of communities directly affected by government inefficiency. Dr. Berastain describes his path to doing this work and the importance of using storytelling in making social change. CPI’s work creates system change by centering the most marginalized, such as low income, LGBTQ and immigrant communities.
“At CPI, storytelling is a powerful tool because stories serve as portals into the experiences that we might have never imagined. They are imbued with meaning, and they offer insights that can challenge our assumptions and expand our understanding. At their core, stories are tapestries of human experience. They’re woven with threads of emotion and resilience and shared humanity. They reveal our interconnectedness, and they remind us of our common ground…Through storytelling we don’t just share our perspectives, we uncover new ones, and it’s that exchange of stories of narratives that can shift mindsets and can spark empathy and even catalyze action.”
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