How do you bring the asset message to members of your community who don’t speak English? This is a question that Colorado’s statewide Healthy Communities • Healthy Youth initiative, Assets for Colorado Youth, has been trying to answer since 1997.
Assets for Colorado Youth (ACY) started as a grant-making organization, giving money to community groups who had creative ideas using the Developmental Assets framework. ACY focused their efforts on communities with large ethnic minority groups across Colorado and much of their early learning came from these communities.
“Colorado has a growing non-English-speaking population who speak many different languages, but our biggest success has been with the Spanish-speaking population,” says Assets for Colorado Youth executive director Stephanie Hoy.
According to Hoy, “There was a group of Spanish-speaking mothers really involved with one of our community partners, the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition. They really reacted well to the asset framework.” This group of mothers thought the Developmental Assets were very similar to some of the traditions they grew up with, particularly the dichos, or sayings, told to them by their families.
Dichos are Spanish-language proverbs that are passed from generation to generation in many Mexican families. “Most of them are just beautiful sayings that parents would raise their kids with, just like our parents raised us with messages like ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket,’ but dichos are more beautiful and profound,” says Hoy.
The mothers working with the parent coalition identified a dichos for every asset category as a means to share the asset framework with other Spanish-speaking parents. “We were able to talk to folks not just in their native language, but about the way they grew up and about the messages they received so they could see that the asset framework was very similar,” says Hoy.
In addition to the dichos that corresponded with each asset category, the mothers also came up with an activity and turned it into a handout. “The handout is bilingual, so it’s really fun in a mixed-language group to introduce the dichos and get other people to talk about the proverbs and the messages they grew up with,” says Hoy.
The dichos were just the beginning of ACY’s work with Spanish-speaking families. The organization offers all of their materials and trainings in Spanish as well as English and strives to be culturally sensitive in all of their translations. “All of our materials are bilingual and they are translated in a culturally relevant way. They are not translated by a computer; they are translated into the dialect that the parents in that particular community speak,” says Hoy.
When asked what she would tell a community just starting to engage a non-English speaking population, Hoy had several tips to share:
- Don’t view not being able to speak English as a deficit. “Go in looking for strengths. Sure, there is sometimes a language barrier, but that doesn’t make the non-English-speaker inadequate. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to communicate,” says Hoy.
- Be welcoming and relevant. A commonly held assumption is that if parents don’t show up, they don’t care. The reality often is that non-English-speakers won’t come to parent activities in schools and communities because they don’t feel welcome, they weren’t invited, or it’s not relevant to them. “What you have to do is find out what would make it relevant to them and extend an invitation or find out why they aren’t coming.”
- Look for natural connecting places in the community. Is there a local church, neighborhood, or market where non-English speaking individuals in your community feel comfortable? Work through these natural connecting places instead of trying to force new connections. Hoy gives this example from ACY’s work: “In parts of metro Denver, there are neighborhoods where a lot of the non-English-speakers are most comfortable in a church, so we do our outreach through the church. In other places they have their own formal networks, so we know if we can get two or three parents involved in recruiting, then they’ll bring twenty more.”
The language barrier can be a difficult one to overcome, but Assets for Colorado Youth has shown that it’s not impossible. In fact, with the correct approach, sharing the assets across languages and cultures can make them more relevant to more people than ever.
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