Latino Economic Development Center CI Report – Interim

What has been most instrumental to your progress?

Focus groups
We conducted or co-facilitated several focus groups and discussions. In general, LEDC is new to this kind of community engagement. Often in the nonprofit world, we can fall into the trap of thinking that, because we hear from students and program participants every day, we already know everything there is to know. We were pleasantly surprised at how much information we learned, especially from Casa de Esperanza’s listening sessions, about how things like trust and confidence are just as important as factors like class structure or income on education, and about the philosophy and logistics of conducting listening sessions. Another great result of this process has been that LEDC had to work closely with other Latino community organizations. This has allowed us to share information and see opportunities to more intentionally combine forces with youth-focused programs at our partner organizations.

Surveys
Over the past year, we have been able to invest time into structured data collection from our GED students to find out why students miss class, drop out, or decide to postpone their degree. We have also been able to survey Latino college students through the Latino Scholarship Fund about their experiences. It allowed our stakeholders to give us anonymous and direct feedback about how our programs could improve. In general, it has moved us to be more intentional about soliciting anonymous feedback, which is important, since many Latinos feel apprehensive about providing constructive comments.

Secondary research. Being able to dedicate time to read over studies of Latino youth across the country allowed us to see the disparities in employment and educational achievement and decide what to look for during focus groups and in our other research. It also allowed us to see how Minnesota is different from other parts of the country.

Key lessons learned

We learned that many amazing programs exist to help Latino youth succeed in higher education, but the most significant barriers continue to be financial and informational. LEDC has offered scholarships through the Latino Scholarship Fund (LSF) since 2006, but college costs and student needs have far outpaced the growth in our fund. We need to work to grow LSF, but also help applicants to find other resources. Popular education about financial aid and college preparation emerged as a need during several listening sessions, surveys, and in secondary research. In the past, LEDC has done presentations in Spanish on these topics, but they were lightly attended. We could do a better job of meeting parents and students in places where they already gather, especially when we typically visit high schools to promote the scholarship fund. We also have an opportunity to get students and parents involved as volunteers to help grow the fund.

Lastly, we have created bilingual guides for students and parents in the past, but we haven’t published them on our website or promoted them on social media as well as we could have. The Latino Scholarship Fund social media presence could be a good vehicle for that kind of a campaign.

Reflections on inclusive, collaborative or resourceful problem-solving

Resourcefulness has been a major factor in making progress on this project. Using the wisdom that the community already has and the community gatherings that already existed was vital, not only because we lost a significant amount of staff capacity in 2016 and 2017, but also because it established trust and signaled to our stakeholders that we needed and valued their input.

Other key elements of Community Innovation

Having staff who were open to change and come from the Latino community was important. By having bilingual, multicultural staff with strong connections to our students, scholarship winners, and community in general carry out the projects, I think we were able to get honest and good quality information. It was also helpful that all of the staff who worked on this project were open to new ideas and collaboration.

Understanding the problem

We learned that education is the biggest factor in career success. For Latino youth with a college degree, internship experience and networking opportunities would be another important factor, but helping Latinos to pursue a post-secondary degree should be our priority. We learned that financial limitations, informational limitations, immigration status limitations, and family obligations are the barriers that we should focus on addressing. We learned that there is strength in the collective, so LEDC needs to invest in partnerships to make the biggest impact. We also learned that, for a program to be successful, we need to make it a welcoming, encouraging space, which means making our students feel like their teachers, counselors, and classmates care about them as people as well as pupils and will meet them where they are. The focus groups and surveys produced a wealth of ideas of improvements we can make to our classes, scholarship program, and popular education activities.

If you could do it all over again…

I would have done the focus groups and collaborations with other organizations sooner in the year. We focused the beginning of our research on secondary sources, and we looked at a lot of statistics on the labor force and discrimination in general. The statistics we chose to look at first were influenced by preconceived notions about what variables affect employment, but didn’t give us that key information about why. There are a lot of factors that are interrelated, like income, discrimination, and immigration status, but immigration status information is generally unavailable. If we had done the focus groups first, we could have focused sooner on higher education and immigration issues. We did one focus group at the beginning of the year, but it was only students and not as open-ended and insightful as the later focus groups.

One last thought

With the Bush Foundation’s contribution, LEDC has been able to allocate staff time to partner with Macalester College and the Hispanic Advocacy and Community Empowerment through Research (HACER) to form part of the Minnesota Young Adult Leadership Academy Advisory Committee (MYALA). The main goal is to provide the Latino youth with leadership tools and educational resources to make an impact in our changing communities. The role of LEDC is to contribute to the development of this working project that will take place next year in February 2018.