Posted on December 5, 2018 | Amy Green, Identity
Every few weeks, the Weissberg Foundation features a story from one of our Reframing <Washington> Empowerment Fund grantee partners to shine a light on their critical work. Learn more about these powerful organizations by visiting their websites.
Identity creates opportunities for Latino youth to believe in themselves and realize their highest potential. Through its Padres Latinos Conectados program, Identity is expanding Latino civic engagement through the creation of a formal, culturally and linguistically competent leadership-training program that includes a parent leadership network and opportunities to increase Latino parent involvement in issues that are critical to their children’s academic success. Identity envisions a just and equitable society that nurtures all youth and is enriched by their contributions.
Identity is honored to have supported the successful growth and development of tens of thousands of individual at-risk Latino youth over 20 years. Their personal perseverance and ability to push beyond obstacles related to trauma, poverty, language isolation and fear inspires our work to build social emotional skills, improve academic achievement and increase job readiness.
But, helping one child at a time, one school at a time is simply not enough. So we strengthened our community engagement, policy and advocacy efforts by launching Latino Padres Conectados, and its training program, Academia de Liderazgo/Parent Leadership Academy, an ambitious project to train and help parents find and use their voice to advocate for equity in education. We have trained 50 parents so far. Together they are building a culture of civic engagement and activism to interrupt patterns of underachievement, lost hope and disconnection for all children.
The video below was a collaboration among many folks on the Identity team. A special acknowledgement goes out to everyone who contributed to this process. View the video to learn more about our Academia de Liderazgo. For more information about Identity, please visit our website.
Identity’s Academia De Liderazgo
Amy Green Thrasher is the Senior Manager of Development and Communications for Identity, where the former journalist works to give voice to the thousands of Identity youth and their families, helping them share their stories with the greater community to advance Identity’s vision of a just and equitable society that nurtures all youth and is enriched by their contributions.
