Our Work Related to Civic Participation

The 2Cooltura project was created in 2006 for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention within the Department of Justice. Thanks to a generous renewal grant from the Department of Justice, SRF and Hispanic Communications Network have come together again to help Hispanic youth get out of and stay out of gangs.

The 2009-2010 phase of 2Cooltura will utilize the project’s already established branding but tailor the media, outreach, and website to two specific geographic locations and cultural populations: Montgomery, Maryland and Wake County, North Carolina.

The Latino gangs of Maryland are primarily composed of second-generation Latinos, while the Latino gangs of North Carolina are mostly first-generation immigrants. Localizing both projects will enable us to streamline the program message while also catering to the specificities of each community in order to have a more acute impact.

For a taste of what this year’s media products will look like, check out our original 2Cooltura PSA video with Grammy-nominated rock en espanol band La Secta Allstar:

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.