By Rachel Showstack
Four years ago, the grant-funded activities for a Latine community health project I was leading in Wichita were coming to an end, just as the world was hurtling into the greatest public health crisis of a generation. At that time, I could not have even dreamed that the coalition we were starting to build would blossom into what Alce su Voz has become today.
The name Alce su Voz emerged when my former student Jennifer Ramírez created our Facebook page in September 2020. To commemorate our four-year anniversary I’d like to take some time to reflect on the milestones that have allowed us to expand our impact on linguistic justice and health equity for Latine and Indigenous communities across Kansas.
Building a Coalition
By August 2020, with funding from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute1 we had held a series of Spanish-language community meetings to discuss challenges in health care language access (i.e., interpreting services and same-language care) for Spanish-speaking patients, identify barriers, and explore possible solutions. We had also created and disseminated a video to share what we had learned.
During the community meetings, Spanish-speaking patients and their family members, clinicians, and interpreters had shared poignant stories about experiences in which qualified language access services had not been provided for patients who needed them, sometimes leading to negative health outcomes for patients and emotional burdens for loved ones who tried to help.
After pivoting our meetings to Zoom in March 2020, we also pivoted our immediate focus to addressing language-related inequities in the pandemic response by disseminating gift bags with Spanish-language COVID-19 information and personal protective equipment in Latine neighborhoods. Our grassroots pandemic relief activities solidified our bond as a team, and at the same time we continued to develop our long-term vision for improving healthcare language access in Kansas.
During our community meetings, we identified a set of areas where healthcare quality and access could be improved for Spanish-speaking patients, and we set out to develop plans to address those issues through community education, workforce development, and policy maker engagement.
Bringing Healthcare Language Access to the Public Eye
In Fall 2020 and Spring 2021, our focus shifted to raising awareness among Spanish-speaking community members about their right to qualified professional interpreting services and engaging healthcare administrators and lawmakers in conversations about language access.
Facebook became an important venue for us to disseminate information through educational posts and Facebook Live events, and much of what we learned in the first year of the project is presented in our policy brief that was published on Kansas Hispanic Latino American Affairs Commission website.
When we reached out to Kansas lawmakers about a need for state level oversight of language access policies and procedures in Kansas healthcare institutions, we found a champion in State Representative Susan Ruiz, and she continues to support our efforts to this day.
In Spring 2021, a group of students in Dr. Lisa Parcell’s Integrated Marketing Campaigns course designed our logo, created our website, and developed our marketing plan. By that summer, we were recognized by Latine leaders and health equity organizations across the state and had built the connections and reputation needed for the next phase of our work.
Community Workshops on Healthcare Access and Civic Engagement
Thanks to support from the Kansas Health Foundation, 2022 marked the initiation of our in-person community education workshops.
In collaboration with the Latino community health worker organization Salud + Bienestar, we offered our first series of Spanish-language community education workshops, focused on healthcare access for Spanish-speaking Kansans, in spring 2022. The topics of the workshops came directly from the needs identified in our 2020 community meetings: (1) the patient’s right to a qualified professional interpreter (an in-person event that was also streamed live on Facebook), (2) how to attain insurance and pay for healthcare, (3) understanding public health information, and (4) sharing your story.
The final workshop of the first series Comparta su testimonio: Cómo hacer que su voz se escuche (‘Share Your Story: How to Make Your Voice Heard’), led by community organizer Audé Negrete, director of the Kansas Latino Community Network, and attorney/teacher Catalina Velarde, focused on how Spanish-speaking Kansans can make an impact on public opinion and politics by using their own voices and personal healthcare stories to call for improved healthcare language access services.
From that workshop, and from the innovative thinking of Alce su Voz program manager Savannah Paschal when they were an undergraduate student at WSU, Alce su Voz developed a focus on civic engagement for health equity in Latine communities, and we have since offered a range of civic engagement workshops and produced an ongoing bilingual media campaign to encourage civic participation.
The foundation laid through our community engagement and education in Wichita paved the way for a massive expansion of our initiatives in 2023.
Federal Funding for Language Access and Vaccine Equity
The next major milestone was the selection of Alce su Voz for the Promoting Equitable Access to Language Services in Health and Human Services initiative of the Office of Minority Health of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (OMH DHHS). As one of the eleven organizations selected from across the US for this three-year initiative, we have had the opportunity to dramatically expand our efforts to improve healthcare language access through community education, workforce development, and policy research, and we have expanded our coalition building to Seward, Finney, Ford, and Cowley counties.
The funding from the OMH DHHS award has allowed us to build our workforce development resources with our Interpreter Engagement and Education Team led by Rommy Vargas Bezzubikoff, CEO of Spanish Ad Hoc Translations, and our Clinician Education team, led by Dr. Colleen Loo-Gross of KU-Wichita Department of Family and Community Medicine. It has also supported our policy research initiative, which included a language access policy research project led by Dr. Nikki Keene Woods of the WSU Department of Public Health Sciences, a Language Access Policy Summit in Topeka, and a forthcoming white paper on Kansas healthcare language access policy.
Meanwhile, in response to needs identified by state healthcare leaders, Alce su Voz expanded our efforts to include a focus on southern Kansas Mayan communities when we received an Increase the Reach award from the Kansas Department of Health and the Environment. Managed by Monique Garcia and Geovannie Gone of the Immunize Kansas Coalition, this award allowed us to build coalitions for health equity with Mayan communities in Dodge City, Ark City, and Coffeyville.
Denise Romero of Salud + Bienestar has led our community engagement and education efforts for both projects, and we were extremely lucky to hire a full-time program manager Elizabeth Ramirez to join the OMH DHHS project in October 2023.
Capacity Building in Partnership with the Kansas Health Foundation
In 2024, Alce su Voz is focusing on capacity building with support from the Building Power and Equity Partnership with the Kansas Health Foundation, and for this we are especially grateful to our program officer Juston White, who is supporting us through the processes of establishing our strategic plan to maximize our community impact. This partnership has allowed us to engage in team strategic planning meetings facilitated by the Wichita State Community Engagement Institute’s Center for Organizational Development and hire a new Media Director, WSU graduate student and seasoned Latina community leader Arely Navarrete Velazquez.
With a growing staff of bright, creative, and dedicated individuals, a loyal community following in Wichita and expanding engagement across rural southern Kansas, an enduring mission and vision, and multiple federal, state, and foundation grants, we have greatly expanded our capacity to work toward linguistic justice and health equity in Kansas’s multilingual communities.
To support this process of capacity building, join us in our efforts to advance linguistic justice and health equity in Kansas. Stay engaged in our community to help ensure everyone has access to the care and services they need.
Alce su voz is a community-based initiative of Wichita State University whose mission is to improve health equity for Spanish speakers and speakers of Indigenous languages in the United States, with a focus on Kansas and the Midwest. For more information or to get involved, please send an email to alcesuvoz@wichita.edu. You can also join our email list and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
- Federal Award #88488-TOSU ↩︎