Introduction

Weaving Partnerships with Latino Communities

Whether we’re working with a school, a community technology center, a Head Start program, or a community health organization, EDC emphasizes the importance of data-based decision making. We help organizations of all sizes learn to collect, analyze, and act on data that can guide them toward targeted solutions.

Sometimes we have to remind ourselves to apply the same process to our own work. This Mosaic grows out of a year of research, discussion, and professional development focused on demographic data detailing the growth of the Latino population within the United States. Our research proceeded on two fronts: First, EDC Vice President Eric Jolly* began an exploration that dug beneath the headlines on the shifting demographics. Jolly demonstrated how some of the conventional wisdom about Latino populations in America ignored essential nuances. Jolly's article in this issue, "Beneath the Surface," details some of his findings and discusses some of the implications the data have for health and education programs.

Second, in tandem with Jolly’s demographic study, Costanza Eggers-Piérola of EDC’s Center for Children & Families initiated an exhaustive study of EDC projects focused on Latino communities over the past 25 years—in both the United States and Central and South America. How had our work evolved over the years? What had we learned from these experiences? How can these findings inform current and future work at EDC?

This research led to a series of discussions among EDC’s senior leadership, resulting in a typical EDC reply: We need to know more. We wanted to broaden the discussions to include Latino researchers from outside EDC to help us simultaneously broaden our knowledge base and sharpen our focus. As Jolly writes in this issue, “Our understanding of ‘need’ and our programming of ‘culturally responsive interventions’ must be based on a true understanding of the people we work with, not an amalgamation of an ‘average’ Latino.”

We wanted to broaden the discussions to include Latino researchers from outside EDC to help us simultaneously broaden our knowledge base and sharpen our focus.

With that goal in mind, Jolly and Joanna Jones, EDC’s director of human resources, designed an innovative professional development program for the company that ran for several days in October 2003. Jolly and Jones—along with a team from throughout EDC—invited five Latino leaders working in the United States and in South America to come to EDC for a series of working sessions with staff. Sessions addressed everything from mathematics and science programs in rural schools in the Southwest to respiratory problems in urban Latino communities to evaluations of micro-enterprise programs in South America.

This institute, called the Visiting Practitioners Program, was a great success—energizing the practitioners as well as EDC staff members. The workshops laid the groundwork for new collaborations among the practitioners and EDC. The program also reaffirmed a basic EDC approach to designing programs for diverse communities: Looking hard at the challenges facing one distinct population helps to inform the development of truly inclusive programs for all.

That notion is illustrated in this issue of Mosaic with profiles of several EDC projects underway in Latino communities throughout the country. The success of these projects comes from their ability to collaborate with a specific community, which happens to be primarily Latino. As Eric Jolly argues in “Beneath the Surface,” our understanding of the variability within groups—as well as between them—will allow us to engage with “the true needs and priorities of our community partners.”

*Editor's Note:
Eric Jolly left EDC in March 2004 to become President of the Science Museum of Minnesota.

For questions or comments, contact mosaic@edc.org.

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