Lalita D. Booth

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“I work hard and strive to exceed the boundaries I once believed constrained me – and I do it because succeeding will give me the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of others.”

  • Program: 2009 Graduate Scholarship Recipient
  • Resides: Medford, MA
  • Hometown: Asheville, NC
  • Age: 31

Biography

PROFILE: When Lalita Booth was named one of Glamour Magazine’s Top Ten college women of 2008, she remarked to the reporter how grateful she is “every day when I walk on campus” at the University of Central Florida (UCF). Lalita’s story in Glamour was headlined “The Comeback” and oh what a comeback it has been. She was a homeless teenager and a single mother who had to send her son away to live with family. But Lalita worked tirelessly at a job as a tax advisor and was soon able to bring her son home. Since then, Lalita’s life has become a non-stop success story. Deterimined to create a better life for herself and her son, she enrolled in community college, became an honor student and earned a scholarship from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. At UCF she began “Lighthouse for Dreams”, a nonprofit organization that teaches financial literacy classes to low-income learners, foster teens, and high school students. She also authored a book on financial education and will soon begin graduate school at Harvard where she hopes to receive a joint Master in Public Policy and Master of Business Administration. Lalita has survived heartache and misfortune, stared many obstacles in the eye, and overcame them all. 

INSPIRATION: Lalita owes a great deal of her success to her mentor at UCF, Dr. James Gilkeson, who worked with her while she wrote her first book, Financial Education for Low-Income Audiences: A Guide to Program Design, Implementation, and Evaluation.
 
ASPIRATION: With an unwavering commitment to serving the public good, Lalita hopes to use the model of “Lighthouse for Dreams” as the basis for a national project to help provide financial literacy to the poor. Her dream job doesn’t  exist . . . yet. “If I could have any job in the world, what I would like to see is a new position created within the Department of Treasury’s Office of Financial Education, and I would love to volunteer to be the person who runs it. I’d jump at the chance to fill it.”
 
MAKING A DIFFERENCE: Lalita has been quoted as saying, “you can either have a great excuse, or a great story.” In her case, it’s the latter. In 2006 she founded the aforementioned Lighthouse for Dreams that is already helping low-income residents of the Orlando area cope with financial matters. 
 
ACCOLADES: Lalita is a recipient of a Harry S. Truman Foundation Fellowship as well as being awarded the Dean’s Gold Medallion for Civic Service at UCF. Other honors at her undergraduate institution include the College of Business Founder’s Day Award and the Order of the Pegasus (the highest honor given at UCF). 
 
INTERESTING FACT: Although Lalita is a straight A student and bound for Harvard, she confesses, “I’m really, really bad at math.”

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