Hispanic Center of Western Michigan
Tamara Brubaker-Salcedo, Interim Executive Director
560 Hall SW
Grand Rapids, Mich. 49503
(616) 452-4010
(616) 452-4242 fax

Organized in 1978 to provide a simple basic need -- access to services for migrant farm workers and their families who spoke only Spanish in a community where most institutions speak only English -- the Hispanic Center quickly grew into a multi-purpose organization serving Grand Rapids' large Spanish-speaking community. In recent years, faced with rapid growth in its client population at the same time as Republicans in the Statehouse and Congress were cutting its sources of income, this creative organization has found innovative ways to build its own self-sufficiency.

One of its first and most visible services, the Saint Mary's Clinic, is not actually run by the Hispanic Center; rather, it provided the critical role of acting as catalyst and facilitator, providing space and the impetus to St. Mary's Hospital to open a free/low-cost medical and dental clinic in its inner-city offices, a former fire station, now bearing bright Hispanic wall murals where the fire engine doors used to be. This clinic is staffed by Spanish-speaking nurses and aides and by a rotating corps of English-speaking physicians, who donate their time and work with patients with the nurses and aides acting as translators, primarily offering prenatal care, pediatrics, some preventive care, WIC and dental care. It's a difficult thing to be a patient OR a doctor if you can't speak each other's language, notes Brubaker-Salcedo; but until this program came to be, Spanish speakers in Grand Rapids had no easy answer to this problem.

Other programs based on community needs include an employment-assistance effort, essentially a non-profit employment and counseling agency serving some 100 people a month looking for jobs; free interpreting and translation services for critical needs; family and individual counseling services (provided free on a twice-weekly basis by Catholic Social Services Family Outreach workers); AIDS-HIV counseling for young people; Christmas and Thanksgiving baskets for 300 families; and an information-and-referral hotline directing Spanish-speaking residents to social services and emergency-aid programs, filling the gap left by Grand Rapids' United Way hotline, which is monolingual in English. A highly successful summer youth employment program that has offered summer jobs and training to as many as 40 low-income youngsters each year is apparently sputtering its last; cuts in JTPA and state funds will spell its doom unless other funding can be found before next summer.

Similar cuts forced the recent layoff of four social workers, reducing the Hispanic Center's staff to six, and slashing its budget to less than $300,000 a year, including $15,000 in revenue from the state Department of Social Services, $40,000 from the city of Grand Rapids, and $80,000 from United Way. The organization is taking steps to increase its self-sufficiency, though, including special fund-raising events and selling booth space at major local events like the city's annual Hispanic Festival (the weekend after Labor Day) and other community festivals.

Its most innovative fund-raising effort, though, grew out of its existing Spanish-to-English interpreting and translation services. In addition to providing translation free for low-income Spanish speakers, Hispanic Center has established itself as a broker for translators in many languages, from Spanish to Haitian, Polish, Vietnamese, Bosnian, even American Sign Language. Institutions requiring translators, including hospitals, courts, and government agencies, call on the Hispanic Center, which has gathered a list of qualified translators in many languages prepared to interpret on a contract basis. Averaging some 30 contracts a month, the group received about $90,000 for these services last year, of which half went to the individual translators and half bolstered the organization's income. This simple concept, providing revenue to the organization and to residents, seems easily exportable to any non-profit group working in a bilingual or multilingual community.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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