North Carolina’s Philanthropies Join Forces to Aid Hispanics

By Suzanne Perry

When Ilana Dubester started a nonprofit group in 1995 to help the growing number of Hispanic immigrants

who were settling in central North Carolina, she faced a steep learning curve.

“I swear I knew absolutely nothing,” says Ms. Dubester, a native Brazilian who founded the Hispanic Liaison of Chatham County. “I had never written a grant. I had never even written formally in this country.”

She and others wanted to help the Spanish-speaking newcomers get better health care, housing, financial services, and job conditions — but they had to start from scratch.

“Everybody was at a loss,” she says. “We didn’t know where to start, what to do about any of these problems we were facing.”

Today, both North Carolina and Ms. Dubester have come a long way.

Home to one of the nation’s fastest-growing Hispanic populations, the state now boasts more than 50 groups that are led by and offer services to Hispanic residents, many of them formed since 2000. And Ms. Dubester is program coordinator for a major grant-making project that has raised millions of dollars to help many such groups thrive — the North Carolina Funders’ Collaborative for Strong Latino Communities.

While Hispanic leaders are generally pessimistic about the pace of giving to Hispanic groups, some of them see North Carolina as one of the bright spots.

The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, in Winston-Salem, has played a lead role in the state, making an initial grant to the collaborative project of $500,000 — and setting aside $250,000 of that as matching funds to spur giving by other foundations.

The foundation was already giving money to Hispanic groups as part of its mission to help “underserved” groups, says Thomas W. Ross, executive director of the Reynolds Foundation. “We saw this as an opportunity to bring other funders to the table on this issue.”

The Funders’ Collaborative — part of a national program sponsored by Hispanics in Philanthropy, an organization of grant makers, in San Francisco — has awarded almost $1.3-million since 2003 to 28 organizations, like Centro de Acción Latino, the Hispanic League of the Piedmont Triad, the Latino Advocacy Coalition of Henderson County, and Student Action With Farmworkers. Half of the money raised has come from 23 foundations in the state, the other half in matching grants provided by Hispanics in Philanthropy.

Workers in Demand

North Carolina offers a microcosm of the country’s fast-changing demographics. Fueled by an economic boom in the 1990s that created a voracious demand for labor, the state’s Hispanic population jumped 1,066 percent from 1970 to 2004 (compared with nationwide growth of 355 percent), according to U.S. Census Bureau data cited in a recent study by the University of North Carolina.

Seven percent, or nearly 601,000, of North Carolina’s residents were Hispanic in 2004 — up from 1.1 percent in 1990, the study found. Almost half (45 percent) had come to the United States illegally. Forty percent of those arriving since 1995 came from other U.S. states, 38 percent came directly from Latin America (three-fourths from Mexico), and 22 percent were born in North Carolina.

The influx was driven primarily by jobs in construction, meatpacking, agriculture, and manufacturing.

The study, by the university’s Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, tried to measure the economic impact of North Carolina’s Hispanic population. The conclusion: Hispanic residents in 2004 cost the state budget a net $61-million for health care, education, and correctional services, but they contributed $9-billion to the state’s economy through their spending and taxes.

The study also found that Hispanics earned less than their non-Hispanic neighbors ($8,649 per person versus $14,480), were more likely to live in poverty (26.3 percent versus 14.5 percent), and were less educated (7.5 years of schooling versus 12).

When Ms. Dubester started the Hispanic Liaison, she says, many Hispanic residents were living in substandard housing, faced job discrimination, and had trouble getting medical care and government services because of a shortage of Spanish interpreters. She started her group, in Siler City, to help victims of crime and fraud, offer financial counseling and small loans, and provide education about U.S. laws and government services.

The Hispanic Liaison is now among the groups that get money from the Funders’ Collaborative. Another is the Latino Community Credit Union, in Durham. One of the fastest-growing credit unions in the country, with 46,000 members and five branches, it was set up in 1999 after immigrants started getting robbed because they did not have bank accounts in which to deposit their money.

“They were walking banks,” says Luis Pastor, the credit union’s chief executive. “Banks were not willing or able to open accounts [for them], or they did not have trust in financial institutions.”

The nonprofit credit union has a bilingual staff, and it offers financial-education classes to its clients, 95 percent of whom have low incomes and 75 percent of whom are opening their first bank accounts, according to Mr. Pastor. The Funders’ Collaborative gave the institution a grant of more than $100,000 in 2004 to start a mortgage-lending program. The result: “We have more than 200 people living in their own homes,” Mr. Pastor says.

The cooperation between grant makers on the Funders’ Collaborative has helped North Carolina cope with its huge influx of immigrants, Mr. Ross says. But it also benefited the state’s foundations, which were prompted partly by this project to set up a new information-sharing group, the North Carolina Network of Grantmakers, he says: “I don’t know that we anticipated the value of funders working together and learning from each other as turned out to be the case.”

Struggles Remain

Even with the strides Hispanic charities in North Carolina have made in recent years, leaders say roadblocks remain, including concerns about discrimination against immigrants.

Last summer, the United Way of Chatham County declined to renew its annual grant to the Hispanic Liaison, saying the organization’s operating costs exceeded a 25-percent limit. However, some philanthropic observers questioned whether the United Way was also responding to complaints about the group’s active involvement in immigrants-rights rallies — and an immigrants’ boycott of work and schools — that were held last spring in North Carolina, as in the rest of the country.

Local newspapers published excerpts of an e-mail message written by Dina Reynolds, the United Way’s executive director, that said “members of our board and many of our donors are concerned about the recent political activism engaged in by the Hispanic Liaison.”

In response to the loss of funds, Ms. Dubester argued that the high operating costs were a one-year aberration, and Mr. Ross, of the Reynolds Foundation, and others asked the United Way to reconsider.

The United Way has since agreed to renew the grant, pending an audit to show that the costs have indeed been brought down.