Building Immigrant Leadership

Immigrant-led organizations often get started in response to a particular concern or threat: stopping a piece of bad legislation, responding to a community crisis, etc. Over time, many of them evolve to take on a broader range of issues, but continue to suffer from serious knowledge and leadership gaps that hinder efforts to impact public policy debates.

We are working with the members of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC) to map out a strategy for building leadership and capacity for policy advocacy that recognizes and celebrates the diversity of immigrant-led organizations; some are purely volunteer organizations, others are small non-profits working at a neighborhood level, and still others have significant local visibility and sizeable paid staffs. This means there will be no one-size-fits all solutions to building capacity.

To see a list of the skills that NALACC has identified as priorities for its members, click HERE. Enlaces will continue to support NALACC with curriculum design and workshop facilitation.

A related and critical need is to build capacity in places of origin. In order for migrants to be effective drivers of local development, they will need to work closely with the local actors who would carry out the activities at the local level. Although there is not a great body of research on this issue, preliminary studies by the University of Zacatecas strongly suggest that the most effective local development outcomes occur when investments are coordinated with organized local planning, and when both migrant organizations and local counterparts are involved in that planning from the beginning. Anecdotally, many migrant groups acknowledge that their investments or donations have had less impact than they expected due to a lack of solid local partners. To date, there has been very little investment in building capacity on a trans-local basis.

The Chicago Immigrant Leadership Empowerment Project- now a project of CONFEMEX

For three years, beginning in 2002, Enlaces América carried out The Chicago Immigrant Leadership Empowerment Project, in partnership with seven Mexican Hometown Federations. In 2005-2006, this project was taken on by CONFEMEX, a Confederation of nine Mexican Federations and dozens of clubs in the greater Chicago area. Enlaces will continue to provide strategic and fundraising advice to this innovative new model of organizational and individual capacity-building.
The 2006 workshop cycle launched in May.

To see a list of themes being addressed this year, click here