Latino Economic Development Center CI Report – Final

What has been most instrumenta to your progress?

We conducted several focus groups and discussions. We are learn the importance of trust from the focus groups from parents, students and community organizations. The collaborations that LEDC created through other Latino organizations has been essential. This allowed us to gain knowledge about resources that were shared with our participants. We also combined forces with Macalester and HACER recently help develop a program called MYALA to help Latino youth in College. MYALA is the program for young Latino Students who want to be community leaders and will trained to act as liaison of their communities. MYALA had its first session in February 9-10, 2018, where participants worked together in a variety of sessions, ranging from project development to conversations with elected officials of color and networking. Participants had the unique opportunity to adapt the programming to their needs, helping choose the sessions we offer through their applications.

Last year, we have been investing time in data collection to find our why our GED students decided to not come to our classess. We found that child care, work schedules, transportation, loss of income and the fear about their immigration status influence on them postponing their degree. Our survey to college students, gave us feedback comments on our Latino Scholarship Fund and told us how they continue volunteer and giving back to the community. We continue asking for feedback and giving surveys to our GED students and latino scholarship recipients. Recently we have modify the survey to get more details and continuously implement their feedback to improve as a program.

To understand the position Latino youth have in the labor market, we looked at the following indicators: unemployment, educational achievement, work experience, occupational industry, and immigration status. We found about Latinos in education system, that most Latinos did not attend school beyond high school say that they had to support their family, some did not go to college because of English limitations and some said financial difficulty. This information help us narrow down our survey and worked on questions for our focus group.

Key lessons learned

We learned and gained information from great programs that help the Latino Youth. We also have seen that regardless of the several programs that help Latino Youth, there is the continues barriers on financial aid. Therefore, LEDC has created a monthly orientation for parents and young adults who are interested in learning how to finance college. Our goal is to share educational information and provide resources for parents to gain more knowledge on the higher education process. The youth has also came to our organization searching for help to fill out FAFSA applications. We have created a trustful environment, we still need to carry out educational orientations into the community to learn about how to finance for higher education. In March, 2018, LEDC will also collaborate with Casa Esperanza by sharing informational session to their youth about how to search for scholarship and also how to fill out FAFSA. This is a project we see continuing.

Over the past year, LEDC has expanded its GED in Spanish. We have expanded our GED program and changed from a two-day class into a four day GED classes. We also hired a new teacher to help us increased GED outcomes. All these new implementations have contributed to our student attendance rate. It has also helped us increase the number of students that pass the GED exams. We have a total of 10 students who earn their GED. Now, we have about 7 students more who only need to pass 1 exam to obtain their GED certification. Another implementation we kept is the Pre-GED program and our new tutoring program for those students need an extra help. We also have developed a close relationship with Organization that work with Latino Youth such as Casa Esperanza, La Oportunidad, and Urban Ventures. LEDC has recently collaborated with the Latino Lead where we share sources for the Latino community.

Reflections on the community innovation process

Though, LEDC has lost a significant amount of staff capacity, LEDC was resourceful in the process of this project. LEDC used the collaboration of other organization and exchange resources to continue with the project. The results of this project is seen through our success in our GED classes and also in the continue presentation about financial resources to parents. The collaboration with other organizations to create programs that helps the Latino youth is another success LEDC feel grateful about an example is as MYALA.

Other key elements of Community Innovation

Having staff and instructors that were highly involve with Latino community and being bilingual was important. With that we were able to develop trust and make strong connection with students and the community. Our network expanded through those connections, now we are able to share more information and partner with some schools to talk about our programs and how cwe help them. We are also welcome in business to talk about higher education and get feedback.

Progress toward an innovation

The progress that has made LEDC toward achieving an innovation is gathering information from the community and programs to understand how we can create a change. The need we saw through surveys and focus groups was helping address the lack of information on high education and need to get education to find an stable job. For example, for our GED students, we merge Social Studies with Art and Language classes into one session. Majority of our students like this change because students did not longer have to wait another session to pass the exam. We had about four students that pass Social Students and Art and Languages. We have created tutoring program and recruited college students to help our GED students. LEDC believes is closer to achieving an innovation because now we know more in-depth what the community needs and what barriers is stopping some our students to coming to our classes. The connections we have developed with other organization and the trust of the community has help us improve our current programs.

What it will take to reach an innovation?

We believe that the significant lost of staff had an impact on this project but yet we have accomplish a lot and improve our programs. LEDC would required to work intensity with more Latino Organization and institutions to post social media reminders for students to apply for financial aid, financial facts and tips. LEDC could also help college prep programs to recruit student through social media and passing information to parents. LEDC alone cannot fix high education affordability but has improve its programs and started to continuously do presentation to parents about college. As part of our GED program, our GED students still face the child care and transportation problem even when we provide them training on how to use online resources so they don’t miss much on our classes. The steps that would be helpful to reach innovation for the GED class would be developing an online GED class.

What’s next?

The plan for continuing this project is to ensure our ESL and GED students learn about higher education preparation and options for themselves and their children if applicable. LEDC can continue developing more online resources for GED classes in Spanish and explore more options for blended learning. LEDC should continue working with partner schools and organizations by offering assistance with filling out forms and applications. Now that we have more volunteers, that could help students with personal statements, applications, resumes and FAFSA to help facilitate the process.

If you could do it all over again…

At first we focus more on developing our secondary research, where we found preconceived notions about what affects employment but we didn’t get the why. When we did our first focus group, we got a lot of information related to higher education and immigration. I would have done more focus groups as we continue to improve our programs to help us get more feedback.
I believe continuing talking to the community would of allows us to know more about if our changes are benefiting the community and how we can improve more. Though, we have had written feedback from the students, focus groups would of help find more ways to improve.

One last thought

Because LEDC has lost a significant amount of staff capacity, remaining staff invested more hours on this project. That’s an explanation why LEDC, went over the budget on wages. We also see this as ongoing project where we continue giving orientation to parents and going to talk to institutions. We are lucky to have volunteers interested in helping us continue this project and also made connections with CASA ESPERANZA to work with them giving presentation about college and financial aid to the Latino Youth. We are happy to be part of MYALA and be in the advisory committee.