Articles Tagged ‘latino’

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.

SciGirls Outreach is a national educational television program of DragonflyTV, produced by Minnesota Public Television and supported by a generous grant from the National Science Foundation’s Program for Gender Equity. Since 2006, SciGirls Outreach has employed and disseminated the latest research and best practices around engaging girls in science, and has empowered youth organizations, science museums, educators and parents to deliver research-based hands-on STEM encouragement programs to girls in their communities.

To meet the dramatic changes in U.S. demographics and the need for more woman scientists and engineers, the project has expanded programming into Latino communities nationwide via the SciGirls en Espanol initiative working in collaboration with the Self Reliance Foundation.  SciGirls en Espanol provides Spanish-language print and video resources, leader training, and grants to nine existing Latina-serving organizations to help encourage greater engagement in STEM.

The SciGirls project encompasses an upcoming PBS TV show, a website, and a resource provider for educators, club leaders and mentors who are working with girls doing science. SciGirls outreach energizes club meetings, science camps, classes, and other events tailored for girls with DragonflyTV videos that feature girls doing authentic inquiry, along with exciting science activities based on these videos. SRF staffer Alicia Santiago helped select segments that would resonate with young Latinas, oversaw translations for video and print and helped provide insight on how SciGirls content could best serve the Latina community.  The production staff at KLCS TV (a noncommercial educational television station licensed to the Los Angeles Unified School District and a member PBS station) was instrumental in helping repackage individual SciGirls video, collaborating to develop a format that would best serve middle school Latinas and their families.

For more information, or to request review copies of SciGirl en Español materials, send an email to scigirls@tpt.org or visit the SciGirls website.

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.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — From March 26 to 29, 2009, the Self Reliance Foundation hosted the conference: “Expanding Informal Science Education to Latinos” in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the Hotel Albuquerque in Old Town.

The conference brought over 100 representatives from informal science institutions and science research organizations together with Hispanic organizations, media, and educational projects to review current Informal Science Education (ISE) resources, identify needs and gaps, learn about best practices in designing culturally effective programs and resources, and develop new strategies and resources to enrich the informal science learning environment for Latinos. The conference built on existing project partnerships Self Reliance Foundation has developed through its NSF-funded Celebra la Ciencia and Conciencia/Hispanic Science Newswire projects, and sought to further expand initiatives to involve new organizations.

“We know from research that informal science education – science outside the classroom – provides powerful formative experiences that have inspired many to become scientists”, explains Bob Russell, PhD, project director of Celebra la Ciencia. “In many ways, our communities are ’science rich’ – there are thousands of science museums, zoos, community and youth organizations, and science programs across the country. Media – television, radio, and the Internet – pervade our culture in Spanish and English. Our task at this meeting was to harness these resources more effectively.”

“Our challenge was to share what we have and work together to create new opportunities for Latinos to get involved in science”, concludes Russell.

The Conference hosted three keynote sessions designed to help science educators, science researchers, and others in the Hispanic Informal Science marketplace address how to develop new strategies and resources to enrich the informal science learning environment for Latinos.  Attendees had the opportunity to participate in a variety of workshops, including sessions led by Marisol Gamboa, Senior Software Engineer for Harris IT Consulting, Inc; Dr. Inés Cifuentes, a volcanologist and science educator; Fred Mondragón, New Mexico’s Cabinet Secretary of Economic Development; that addressed different topics and offered insights as to better engage Hispanic adults and families in the sciences.

Well-known science institutions and museums such as the New Mexico Museum of Natural History, National Science Foundation (NSF), San Diego Natural History Museum, National Children’s Museum, Institute for Learning Innovation, Space Science Institute, Exploratory Science Museum – UNICAMP, Illinois Institute of Technology, Boys and Girls Club, Latino Organizations such as the Society for the Advancement of Native Americans and Chicanos in Science, the ASPIRA Association, and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers among many others participated in the conference’s educational sessions.

According to Roberto Salazar, President of SRF, the conference was a tremendous success. “We had representatives from government, museums, the non-profit sector, the media, and academia all represented at the conference, sharing their expertise. It was clear to us all that the more we work together, the better – and the more effective – our work becomes.”

The conference was made possible thanks to the generous support of the National Science Foundation.

View the conference program:  Expanding Informal Science Education for Latinos– Conference Program