2002 Celebration
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2002 Celebration |
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Programs Latino Dollars for Scholars of Rhode Island Program Descriptions Latino Dollars for Scholars of Rhode Island Contact The local chapter of the national Dollars for Scholars effort began in 1993 with a challenge grant from the program’s regional director. The dropout rate for Latinos had reached 41 percent in Providence, and several scholarship efforts had folded. The Latino business community was looking for ways to address this issue and was eager to become involved. The program’s mission is to provide scholarships to Latino youth and adults interested in advancing their education, and to create a network of caring mentors to provide academic, personal, and social support while scholarship recipients are in school. Latino Dollars for Scholars of Rhode Island serves as a fund-raising and scholarship network, providing incentives and means for dreams and opportunities to become realities. The utilization of Latino university students and community volunteers as tutors and mentors demonstrates the community’s commitment to its younger members. Between 1994 and 1996, the Rhode Island chapter gave 26 scholarships totaling $30,000, and its academic support program matched 28 Latino high school students with 12 Latino university mentors. Proyecto Familia Contact: Proyecto Familia strengthens families in crisis, addressing every family need (when appropriate) to help keep families intact. It also strives to promote a positive home environment and to foster healthy child development, mental health, and academic achievement. The program’s core service is case management—providing a bilingual-bicultural worker to meet with an identified family, generally through home visits. The worker and the family identify various needs the family may have, including job training, mental health, day care services, and parent education. The worker and family then develop and implement a plan to overcome the barriers to access. Proyecto Familia has, at its heart, the concept of “one worker to one family,” also known as “wraparound services.” The idea is to avoid, and in some cases overcome, the fragmentation of services to families that so often occurs due to various funding sources. For example, consider the case of a family who has one child with a behavior problem, another child with a substance abuse problem, a father who needs job retraining, and a mother who needs help learning English. Obtaining such services would be exhausting for any family, but for a Latino family in crisis, already facing language and cultural barriers, it can be next to impossible. Proyecto Familia is dedicated to helping families negotiate this maze. The Olneyville neighborhood in Providence was—and still is—an area with a large concentration of low-income Latino families. The pilot project for Proyecto Familia was launched there in the mid-1990s in association with Perry Middle School, a public school whose principal, Tomás E. Ramírez, was aggressively looking for programs to help his students and their families. The program’s success has spawned spinoffs in several Providence public schools, including Mt. Pleasant High School, Camden Avenue School, the Leviton Elementary School Complex, and Feinstein Elementary School, all of which are located in low-income areas of the city. All program staff are bilingual-bicultural, and this is key to the program’s success. The program recognizes the fact that different populations speak different languages and view the world differently from so-called “mainstream” America. The home-based nature of the program supports the traditional role of the Latino family in the decision-making process. |