Building the Civic Engagement Infrastructure as We Fly the Plane
For frontline Latinx-serving organizations to both tackle COVID-19 and build Latinx civic engagement has required considerable flexibility. The Latinx communities in southern states with whom HIP works made known their priorities, which were:
Ensure that Latinxs are accurately and fairly counted in the US census;
Increase and protect the Latinx vote;
Grow Latinx leadership at civic decision-making tables;
Build alliances with other Black, Brown, Indigenous and grassroots advocacy groups, networks, and movements as a way to amplify collective racial equity and systems change; and
Expand and advance the use and impact of digital organizing and other technology innovations that support the broader and deeper civic engagement of Latinxs and of Black and Brown alliance-building strategies for civic power-building.
To help these communities, who are redefining in real time what person-to-person means, HIP has provided grants to partner nonprofits to help them achieve their goals. While technology has helped in streamlining daily outreach goals, civic engagement leaders warn against dismissing other traditional outreach efforts.
“As we pivoted our outreach plans from in-person to a virtual operation model, we knew of the importance to maintain some level of human interaction, such as a phone call, caravan, and food banks—especially at a time when we were told to social distance ourselves and many in our community were losing their jobs or getting sick,” said Yadira Sanchez, cofounder of Poder Latinx, a voter outreach organization with operations in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. “We knew that our secret sauce was going back to the basics and understanding how people in our community felt more comfortable interacting with us.”
As a result, Poder Latinx, Jolt, the La UniĂłn del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), and many other nonprofits have adapted multidimensional approaches that included both digital tools and a mix of phone banks, TV/radio ads, and even old-fashioned door-knocking by canvassers wearing masks. These efforts incorporate things like food banks as a way to respond to the immediate economic crisis, while also reminding people of the importance of getting counted for the census and of registering to vote.
Jolt, the largest Latinx civic engagement organization in Texas, has used its platforms to bring together young voters from across the Lone Star state by focusing on social issues like Black Lives Matter, DACA [deferred action for childhood arrivals, the “Dreamers” program], and the killing of Vanessa Guillen, a 20-year-old US Army soldier who was allegedly murdered, inside the Fort Hood, Texas, army base.
“We are harnessing the power of Latino culture to innovate and modernize what civic engagement looks like for a new digital generation of young Latino leaders,” said Antonio Arellano, Jolt’s interim executive director.
But outreach resources in the southern border of Texas’s Rio Grande Valley’s low-income colonias, where access to broadband internet is scarce, looked very different. They see the issue of connectivity as an issue of building a democracy that works for everyone.
“We know that if colonia residents are left out of the decision-making process, they will be left out of the solutions that politicians and county officials propose,” says Martha Sanchez, a LUPE community organizer coordinator.
LUPE has launched a campaign to bring accessible, high-speed internet to the Rio Grande Valley colonias. During the pandemic, as life-saving information was being made available online, residents in the Valley with little to no internet access were left in the dark. And as schools are still doing long-distance learning, parents worried that their children have fallen behind as they do not have adequate internet.
While the path is unclear on how to provide high-speed internet to residents, LUPE understands the power of organizing and is mobilizing the community by collecting signatures from local residents to add pressure to local elected officials.
“When we launched our colonias streetlights campaign more than a decade ago, we didn’t know exactly what the solution would be then either,” Sanchez added. And yet these efforts ultimately succeeded.
While the road ahead might be unclear for many civic organizations across the country, and the challenges are very different, one thing that the pandemic has amplified is the urgent need to continue to grow the support for internet accessibility as a way to bring democracy to communities across the country. The struggle may be great, but Latinx communities, Sanchez reminds us, have regularly refused to take “no” for an answer.
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