Featured Projects

Last year, two of the country’s highest artistic honors – the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony award – went to Latinos. Author Junot Diaz took a Pulitzer for his “The Long and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” and playwright Lin Manuel-Miranda won a Tony for his musical “In the Heights.”

This year, we are seeing an unprecedented amount of in-depth and thoughtful coverage of Latinos not only in print and on stage but on television.

CNN’s “Latino in America”: Soledad O’Brien Reports

On October 21st and 22nd, CNN aired the two-part television documentary “Latino in America.” It is the longest, and most in-depth, piece of non-fiction programming the network has ever produced about Latinos.

“Latino in America” is anchored by Soledad O’Brien. Born of an Afro-Cuban mother and an Irish-Australian father, this mixed-race media maverick has teamed up with producer Rose Arce to document Latino-American life from Pico Rivera, California to Park Place in New York City.

The airing of “Latino in America” has given occasion to activist groups to shine a light on the way the network portrays Latinos in their everyday programming. Some groups say that the only time Latinos are mentioned in CNN’s weekly line-up is on Lou Dobbs’s controversial talk show.

However, with the airing of “Latino in America”, viewers now have the option of hearing something other than Dobb’s often anti-immigrant voice. Night one of the documentary is titled “Meet the Garcias,” and chronicles the very different lives of eight different families with the surname Garcia. Night two is entitled “Chasing the Dream.”

The White House throws a Latino Party: “Fiesta Latina”

Just nine months after coming to D.C. to throw their Latino Inaugural Gala, cultural politicos Marc Anthony, George Lopez, and Eva Longoria Parker were back in the District last week for the “Fiesta Latina” concert the White House held to close out Hispanic Heritage Month. Hosted by President Obama and aired on both PBS and Telemundo, the sixty-minute musical program featured the music of Anthony, Gloria Estefan, Aventura, Thalía, Tito “El Bambino”, and Chicano rock stars Los Lobos.

In an interview with the New York Times, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos stated that, “It’s a political event in that we’re here,” gesturing toward the White House. “But I think it’s more just to celebrate the culture.”

In his opening remarks, President Obama stated that “…though it’s constantly evolving, Latin music speaks to us all in a language we can understand about hope and joy, sorrow and pain, friendship and love. It moves us, and it attempts to make us move a little bit ourselves.”

And at the end of the night, he did. The evening closed with President Obama dancing a little cumbia sway, on camera and on the record.

The Dancer Judge: Justice Sotomayor

Sonia Sotomayor is not only the first Latina to sit on the Supreme Court, but also the first Justice who loves to dance. Besides dancing mambo with Esai Morales at the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts gala, rumor has it that Sotomayor has been out and about in Washington, D.C.’s salsa circuit, rubbing shoulders with the young politicos that she has set such a stellar example for.

According to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) an estimated 50,000 women and children are trafficked into the United States each year. Victims are often lured into trafficking networks through false promises of good working conditions and high pay as domestic workers, factory and farm workers, nannies, waitresses, sales clerks, or models. Once in this country, many suffer extreme physical and mental abuse, including rape, sexual exploitation, torture, beatings, starvation, death threats, and threats to family members. It is believed that most victims who are trafficked are isolated and remain undetected by the public because 1) the strategies used by the perpetrators isolate victims and prevent them from coming forward, and 2) the public and the victim service providers have only recently become aware of this issue and may not be familiar with how to recognize or respond to trafficking victims.

To help stem human trafficking in the US, the Self Reliance Foundation is working with its media partner Hispanic Communications Network to design a Spanish-language public awareness campaign with support from the US Department of Justice – Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA).

This high-impact multimedia campaign is launching in early November 2009. The campaign will pilot in the Washington, DC metro area. Produced in Spanish, this effort will support local human trafficking programs and services, and also help to increase detection and reporting of cases of human trafficking among the local Spanish-speaking population.

To complement the media campaign, SRF will collaborate with the Hispanic-serving community and faith-based partners to disseminate the campaign’s public education materials, and implement interpersonal grassroots outreach efforts to engage “Good Samaritan” members of the greater Hispanic community in the campaign. Our strategy two-pronged strategy is designed to increase the number of community members who understand how to identify human trafficking victims, are aware of the purpose and services of the local service providers, and ultimately are willing to work with the these groups to identify and also rescue and assist human trafficking victims.

To learn more about human trafficking please visit the US Department of Justice’s Online Description.

To help inform and further empower the Latino population in the United States, SRF’s Acceso Hispano initiative recently launched an interactive, multi-dimensional online presence with several innovative features.

The main platform, housed at the website www.accesohispano.org includes four different interfaces directed at four different target audiences:

• English (designed to inform stakeholders about issues facing the Latino community)
• Spanish (designed to reach Spanish-language dominant Hispanics with relevant articles about issues that affect them, in addition to links to helpful websites or organizations)
• Service Providers (developed to help community-based service providers across the country better serve the Latino community by providing tailored information and resources)
• Promotores (to help Acceso Hispano’s network of community-based promoters better serve the community)

The different sections of the Acceso Hispano website include features to help facilitate communication with the public including newsletters; discussion forums; calls for articles from the public; SMS texting capacity; events calendars; comments; email forms; visual search features and more.

The website is designed to complement Acceso Hispano’s toll-free bilingual telephone hotline which provides free information and referrals to callers around the country related to job training, ESL classes, scholarship opportunities, health care options, voter registration sites, domestic violence shelters, and a vast array of other services requested by the Spanish-speaking Hispanic community.  To ensure that the community has access to the culturally-sensitive community based services that they need at any time of day, Acceso Hispano is developing a searchable web-based database of providers.  Service providers can easily update their information online, search the database to help make referrals for their clients, and the general public can conduct instantaneous searches for the specialized services available in their own communities.

Click here to download a brochure about Acceso Hispano.

Acceso Hispano (an U.S.-based initiative of the Self Reliance Foundation) will soon be launching “El Cancer Nos Afecta a Todos” (Cancer Affects All of Us)– a national Spanish-language communications campaign financed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  The campaign will reach Spanish-speaking Latinos through both mass media channels and grassroots outreach activities, and strengthen links between community-based service providers and Latino communities. Ultimately the campaign’s objective is to increase breast and colorectal cancer screening among Latinos and thereby decrease cancer mortality rates.

Cancer is the second leading cause of death among Latinos, but many of the cases could easily be prevented through routine screening and other preventive services.

In preparation for the campaign we are actively seeking to expand partnerships with community health service providers and cancer screening centers.  The campaign’s print, radio, Internet and text messages will build awareness of the importance of cancer screening, and encourage the public to contact our Linea de Ayuda (helpline) by phone or by email to find the location of their local cancer screening centers that provide bilingual or Latino-friendly services. In order to better serve the Latino community, Acceso Hispano is therefore building our database of relevant community health and cancer-related service providers.

If you or your organization provides health care services to Latinos or cancer-related services to the general public, please contact us! We can refer new clients to you, or help you identify the appropriate providers in your region so that you can refer your clients to cancer screening services. We will also be providing educational materials in Spanish related to various cancers and the importance of prevention that you can share with your community.

Why Focus on Cancer?
According to the research conducted by the American Cancer Society and the Intercultural Cancer Council, cancer is the second leading cause of death among Hispanic adults after heart disease. Hispanic women have two to three times the cervical cancer rates of non-Hispanic white women. Hispanic men and women have between 30-90% higher rates of stomach cancer than non-Hispanic populations. Lung cancer and breast cancer are the deadliest cancers among Hispanic men and Hispanic women, respectively.

Despite these alarming statistics, only 38% of Hispanic women age 40 and older regularly receive mammograms, and Hispanic women are less likely to receive regular pap smears than non-Hispanic white women. Deaths from breast and cervical cancers could easily be avoided if cancer screening rates increased among women at risk. Unfortunately, rates of preventive cancer screenings are proportionally linked to insurance coverage- the less insured an ethnic group is, the less likely they are to be screened. Latinos are the most likely of any ethnic in the United States to be under-insured due to a disproportionate lack of job-related insurance.

Furthermore, due to a lack of preventative screenings, Latinos have a disproportionately difficult time with cancer. According to the Volume 4 edition of the NCI Cancer Bulletin published in April 17, 2007, Hispanic women have significantly different experiences with breast cancer than non-Hispanic women do. The Hispanic women studied were diagnosed at a younger age; at a later stage of disease; with larger, higher grade tumors; and with less treatable estrogen- and progesterone-negative tumors, according to resports by Dr. A. Tyler Watlington and colleagues at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

Click here to download a brochure about the “El Cancer Nos Afecta a Todos” campaign.

ConCienciaNews.com is a project designed by SRF, developed and implemented in collaboration with Hispanic Communications Network (HCN), and financed by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

ConCiencia News is the first Spanish-language news service in the United States focused exclusively on health, science and environmental news.  SRF distributes news via ConCiencia free of cost to a diverse array of Hispanic media including 100+ newspapers and magazines, top Hispanic web portals, and almost 150 Spanish-language radio stations.  Each news story features original content developed by SRF journalists, and Hispanic reasearchers are often features to serve as role models for the public.

Why ConCiencia News Service?

The reduction of staff and consolidation of the media has left few resources for local Spanish-language media to offer scientific information to their Latino audiences.  Current studies reveal that Latinos score well below average in math and science in public schools, and are poorly represented in professions related to science and engineering.  To help address these challenges, SRF provides Hispanic media with a continuous source of high-quality scientific news adapted to the needs and interests of the Hispanic community.  This service increases the capacity of Spanish-language news agencies to offer better scientific content.

The market for Spanish-language news media in the United States is broad and growing.  Currently there are more than 1,500 Spanish-language newspapers printed in the U.S. with a circulation of more than 42 million people, and 1,000 Spanish-language radio stations on the air around the country reaching millions of listeners each day.  In addition the Hispanic online presence is growing steadily.

ConCiencia News is supported by an Advisory Committee comprised of experts in the science field and members of the National Association for Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ).

Click here to download a brochure about the ConCiencia News service.