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Weaving Partnerships with Latino Communities

  • Partners in Co-Teaching

    The town of Immokalee, just 40 miles inland from Florida’s Gulf Coast, is surrounded on three sides by citrus groves and tomato fields. Immokalee Middle School serves more than 1,000 students. Of these, 72 percent are Hispanic and 12.5 percent are Haitian. More than 88 percent of the students receive free or reduced-price lunch.

  • Migrant and Seasonal Head Start and Child Care Partnerships

    Arranging affordable, quality child care is essential, but very difficult, for most migrant families. “The challenges migrant families face are very complex,” explains EDC’s Sheila Skiffington. “There are language barriers, 9–5 office hours when applying for care, transportation problems, complicated forms to fill out, and fear of government institutions.”

  • Breaking Barriers

    Every other Monday night, in a temporary office located in the Waltham (Mass.) Hospital, a one-of-a-kind Board of Directors convenes. The issues before the board on this night are typical of many social service agencies: the cost of tuition for the workshops they offer; the success of recent outreach efforts; the development of parent councils in the local schools; the new accounting software. But the board itself isn’t at all typical.

  • Connections and Commitments

    “Good early child care programs build on what each child brings to the center—in terms of culture, language, and experiences,” says EDC’s Costanza Eggers-Piérola. “But how do non-Latino staff reach out to Latino families? How do they reinforce early literacy skills among non-English-speaking children? How do they attract and support Latino staff members?”

  • The VOICES/VOCES Intervention

    This article is excerpted from Rigor, Collaboration, and Care: Two Decades of HIV/AIDS Prevention Research (2003), produced by EDC’s Health and Human Development Programs. It describes the development of culturally sensitive educational videos that have produced positive behavior changes among African American and Latino men and women.