Inspiring Leadership in Immigrant Communities - ILRC

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Inspiring Leadership in Immigrant CommunitiesJanuary 2003• Becoming prepared for INS raids and detention• Helping immigrant parents become more active in their children’s schools• Helping immigrant parents make their children's schools more responsive to theirideas and concerns• Improving housing for low-income immigrants• Improving public safety in immigrant communitiesExample: When the ILRC partnered with grassroots immigrant organization CentroBilingue to conduct leadership training from 1994 to ’97, they centered the training onnaturalization. During the mid-1990s there was a big push in the immigrant community tonaturalize as many people as possible, so the timing was perfect to focus onnaturalization. All the leadership skill building involved in the training focused onnaturalization. Thus, the outreach skill development exercises allowed the participants topractice doing outreach about the importance of naturalizing. The public speaking skilldevelopment exercises focused on speaking about the general naturalizationrequirements. The media exercise was a practice press conference that served to kick offa naturalization program that the leaders were doing.Who should decide the topic or topics of focus? Although agency staff should ultimately beresponsible for making sure a worthwhile and reasonable decision is made, the immigrants livingin the community that is being served through this program must be the actively involves in thedecision-making process. If the immigrant community does not have sufficient input, it will beharder to recruit participants to become leaders, more difficult for the newly trained leaders togarner the community support necessary to make a difference, and it will be less likely that thework the project does is important in the community. Additionally, without allowing theimmigrant community to give sufficient input, the idea of helping to raise the immigrant voicewill be lost.There are several ways for the host agency to involve the immigrant community in the decisionmakingprocess. Hopefully, each agency already has a system to involve the community it servesin the decision-making processes for the programs it already has in place. Some of these systemsinclude…• developing an advisory board that has the power and knowledge of the communityneeded to make decisions;• conducting phone, in-person or focus group surveys of the needs of the community;• asking participating leaders choose the issues; and• setting up community forums in which you ask community members their views.§ 3.6 Choosing the Leaders for a Leadership TrainingA key element for a successful training project is the selection of the participants for thesetrainings. Generally, participants should be people whom the community considers to be leadersor potential leaders. To find them, the agency must identify groups in which immigrantsparticipate, such as churches, solidarity groups and parent-teacher associations. Agencies also3-5
Inspiring Leadership in Immigrant CommunitiesJanuary 2003should look at former clients and volunteers as potential participants. Additionally, agencies canask other organizations in the community to recommend clients and volunteers. Perhaps the bestway to find leaders and potential leaders for this program is to ask immigrants in the communityfor recommendations.In approaching potential participants, the sponsoring agency should explain what the programwould entail. The agency should tell the participants about the necessary commitments theparticipant must make and the huge benefits the agency, the community, and the leader will reapfrom the leadership program. Make sure that each potential leader recognizes that it would be anhonor to be chosen to participate in the project. Specifically, some of the benefits of the programwill include:• Enhancing the participants’ knowledge of immigration law and immigrant rights sothat they will be better equipped to serve their own community.• Refining the participants’ skills in group leadership, outreach, public speaking, andwork with the media so that their communities will be more effective atcommunicating their ideas and concerns.• Developing a network with leaders of other groups involved in the immigrantcommunity so they can act as resources to each other.• Developing skills to assist agencies in providing services that benefit the immigrantcommunity.• Developing working relationships with immigrant service organizations.When choosing a group of leaders to participate in the program it is vital to try and make sure thegroup has a mixture of people of different ages and a roughly similar number of men andwomen, where possible. Another issue to consider is whether to make the training ethnicallydiverse or comprised of one ethnic group. Such choices can be easy in communities where thereis only one ethnic group of immigrants, but would obviously be more challenging for agenciesthat serve several different immigrant groups.If the agency chooses to mix people of different ethnic groups in one training, then it is evenmore important to make sure the individuals involved get along and they do not harbor any illfeelings due to racial or ethnic conflicts in their home countries or in the United States thatwould interfere with their abilities to work together on this project.After selecting a group of potential participants, the sponsoring agency should conduct anextensive interview with each potential participant and ask for references who can talk with theagency about how the person might fit or not fit into the program. When conducting theinterviews, it is important that the leaders you are interviewing are committed, willing to workhard, and able to spend a significant amount of time participating in the training and the workthat the leaders will do after the training. Thus, you should be cautious about choosing leaderswho are over committed because of work, family, or other leadership type responsibilities. Onthe other hand, you also should be cautious before choosing people who have no leadershipbackground or commitments because it might indicate the person does not the inclination orbasic skills needed.3-6
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Inspiring Leadership in Immigrant Communities - ILRC

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