Wanted: Hispanic Volunteers

When Armando Martín began volunteering last spring to teach business ethics to high-school students in Denver, he hadn’t volunteered for a charity in more than 20 years.

He was recruited by Junior Achievement, an organization that educates middle- and high-school students

TIPS FOR RECRUITING HISPANIC VOLUNTEERS Tailor the message and emphasize why it is important for Hispanics to help the cause. Enlist Hispanic staff members, board members, or supporters as “ambassadors” to promote the charity. Tap colleges, professional associations, and large employers, including Hispanic chambers of commerce. Collaborate with local volunteer centers that are also aiming to recruit more minority volunteers. Give Hispanic volunteers roles that use their passions and skills — beyond the ability to speak Spanish.

about business as a means to prevent them from dropping out — a particular problem, Mr. Martín notes, among the area’s Hispanic students.

Mr. Martín, who is of Mexican descent, had recently moved back to his native Denver and joined a marketing firm, XL Edge, of which he is now co-owner. When he heard about Junior Achievement from a young Hispanic colleague, he saw it as a perfect fit, a way he could use his knowledge of the business world and his experience as a trainer to help young people, especially Hispanic teenagers.

If Mr. Martín was searching for just the right organization to which he could lend his services, Junior Achievement was searching for him, too.

Margarita Rodriguez-Corriere, who directs the Hispanic Initiative at Junior Achievement Rocky Mountain, says she has recruited 259 volunteers during the last school year, compared with just 100 a year earlier. Volunteers in her program teach in schools that have high concentrations of Hispanic students.

Financed by nearly $2.4-million in grants from the Goizueta Foundation, in Atlanta, and several other grant makers, the recruiting effort is part of a pilot study under way at seven Junior Achievement affiliates across the country.

Cultural Divide

As Hispanics have become the single-largest minority group in the United States, charities like Junior Achievement have found themselves serving more and more Hispanic children and teenagers. Recruiting Hispanic volunteers has in recent years become a major priority for Junior Achievement Rocky Mountain’s parent organization, JA Worldwide, and for other well-known national youth groups, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and the National CASA Association, a network of trained, court-appointed volunteers whose job is to represent and protect children who may have been abused or neglected.

“It’s clear that the Latino community is skyrocketing,” says Jason Pierce, director of field service at the Boy Scouts of America Atlanta Area Council, which has received money from Goizueta. “If we want to make a difference in our community, we have to deliver our programs to them, and we have to do it on their terms, not on our terms.”

But efforts to recruit Hispanic volunteers often run up against a cultural divide. American charities often find that Hispanics, especially those newer to the United States, are unfamiliar with many nonprofit organizations and their work, may not understand the importance of volunteering to groups that serve a broad range of people, and may even undervalue their own ability to make a difference.

Shared Experiences

Despite their efforts to reach out to Hispanic adults, many organizations continue to find a disparity between the percentage of children they serve who are Hispanic and the percentage of Hispanics among their volunteers.

Jim Clune, the National CASA Association’s chief communications officer, reports that close to 12 percent of the children it represents are Hispanic, while slightly more than 4 percent of its volunteers belong to that ethnic group.

And 16 percent of children who receive mentor services through Big Brothers Big Sisters of America’s local affiliates are Hispanic, compared with 8 percent of volunteer mentors, says Sandra Delgado Searl, director of Hispanic mentoring at the group.

Reducing that disparity matters, say staff members at youth charities, because Hispanic volunteers bring Spanish-language skills, as well as cultural knowledge and sensitivity, all of which serve them well in their work with Hispanic youngsters and their families.

“Most of my volunteers who are Hispanic are either immigrants or they have faced a language barrier, so they have had hands-on experience with what the students are facing,” says Ms. Rodriguez-Corriere.

Making Adjustments

Those shared experiences allow Hispanic volunteers to make the standard Junior Achievement curriculum more relevant to students’ lives, she says.

For instance, Junior Achievement instructors talk to students about the difference between “wants” and “needs.”

But with Hispanic students from struggling immigrant families, Ms. Rodriguez-Corriere says, “You don’t talk about vacation as being a want — these kids don’t know vacation, or home computers. They probably just want a soccer ball, which their parents can’t afford. Bringing in a Hispanic volunteer makes it a safe environment for Latino students to talk and ask questions because they feel it’s one of them.”

Understanding Hispanic culture and the Spanish language is particularly important when volunteers come in contact with children’s parents, volunteers and directors of youth programs say — especially parents who don’t speak English fluently, or at all.

“It really makes a difference when you’re establishing rapport with families if you speak their language,” says Carrie Cannon, CASA program director at Stop Child Abuse Now of Northern Virginia, in Alexandria. Ms. Cannon says she looks specifically for volunteers who speak both English and Spanish, because court-appointed special advocates must interact with families as well as with social workers and judges and other court officials.

Among her volunteers is Milagros Mateu, a native-born American of Puerto Rican descent. Ms. Mateu, a retired NASA program administrator, says being Hispanic and bilingual has aided her interactions with the Salvadoran mother of the California-born teenager for whom she advocates.

“In dealing with her mom, it definitely is very important that I understand the Latino culture,” Ms. Mateu says. When the mother wanted her daughter to observe traditional dating practices, such as bringing boys home for chaperoned visits, the volunteer interceded. “I think the fact that we spoke in Spanish and I could honor who she was, it kind of helped me gain her confidence to say, ‘It isn’t like that here,’” she says.

Bilingual volunteers who can speak directly with parents are also important, says Ms. Delgado Searl, because “the last thing we want for our children is for them to act as translators.”

Still, while some Hispanic parents prefer that their children have a Hispanic mentor, she says, others do not. “Some of our parents request non-Latino volunteers because they want their child to be exposed to other cultures,” she says.

Others just want their child to have a role model of any race. Kristi Duron is a data administrator of Mexican descent in Farmers Branch, Tex., whose 9-year-old son receives mentor services through Big Brothers Big Sisters of North Texas, in Irving. She says she didn’t request a Hispanic mentor for her son. It just happened that way. “I wasn’t trying to be picky about what race,” she says. “I was just focusing on a male figure.”

While mentor programs are frequently studied, no evidence has been found that children do better when paired with an adult of the same ethnicity, says Bob Goetsch, executive director of Be a Mentor, a Hayward, Calif., organization that runs mentor programs for youths, primarily in the San Francisco Bay area.

“A Latino businesswoman is a very good mentor to a Latino girl who, as a Latino girl, may find it hard to break out of the family mode and have an entrepreneurial spirit,” he says. “That doesn’t mean that a Caucasian businesswoman can’t learn to understand the issues a Latino girl is going through.”

Raising Awareness

Some groups have had success recruiting Hispanic volunteers from large corporations. For example, Katiuska Delgado, vice president of education operations at Junior Achievement of Georgia, found volunteers at major Atlanta companies like BellSouth, now part of AT&T, and GE Energy, a subsidiary of the General Electric Company.

“We were walking into a culture where it was part of their normal everyday — ‘This is how we do business; we give back,’” she says.

But that familiarity with volunteerism does not hold true among Hispanics who have recently arrived in America, says Beverly Hobbs, a professor of education at Oregon State University and director of a project to involve more Hispanic children and families in 4-H youth-development programs in Oregon.

“We really have to think about volunteerism in a different way, depending on how long Latinos have been in this country,” says Ms. Hobbs, who has studied Hispanics and volunteering in her state. “The more acculturated they are, the more used they are to our American ways.”

Cultural Attitudes

Well-established organizations, like the Boy Scouts and Big Brothers Big Sisters, have found that while they may be household names among Hispanics who have been in the United States for many generations, they may have little name recognition among newly arrived immigrants from Latin America, say representatives of those charities.

“You can’t assume that they know who we are,” says Valarie De La Garza, a Los Angeles marketing consultant who has designed campaigns for Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and National CASA, and has volunteered for her local affiliate of Big Brothers. “That’s the first challenge.”

“There’s a credibility issue,” says Mr. Pierce of Atlanta’s Boy Scouts. “We have to go into these communities and show them we’re here to stay. We’re not a fly-by-night organization.”

In addition to not knowing the organizations, new immigrants may not immediately understand what they do. Research commissioned by Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, consisting of interviews with 109 Hispanics in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York, found few of them were aware of either the organization or the idea of linking young people with mentors, Ms. Delgado Searl says.

In fact, the American tradition of formal volunteering may seem unfamiliar to some Hispanics, says Ms. Hobbs.

“Volunteering in Latin America refers to what wealthy people do, donating to charity,” she says. “The everyday stuff that we call volunteering here is really ‘helping’” in the vernacular of immigrant Hispanics, she adds.

Hispanic-Americans “tend to volunteer close to home,” says Ms. Delgado Searl. “When we talk to Hispanics about volunteering, they say, ‘Well, I take care of my neighbor’s daughter. Is that volunteering?’”

In CASA’s case, the particular work that the charity does, representing children in court cases alleging abuse and neglect, can be a barrier to recruiting volunteers, say Ms. Cannon and Mr. Clune.

“We work with the court system,” Mr. Clune says. “In the Hispanic community they haven’t had the best experience with the court system.”

Because of the central role the family plays in Hispanic culture, people outside the family might not want to be seen as interfering or causing a child to be removed from the home, they say.

Another challenge, Ms. Delgado Searl says, is convincing some Hispanics that they can make a difference.

When recruiting Hispanic volunteers, charity staff members must take certain self-perceptions into account, Ms. Hobbs says.

“We’re very careful to never say we need volunteers to teach the children,” she says. For rural Hispanic adults, “teachers are held in such high respect as learned individuals that they would never see themselves at that level,” she says.

Ms. Delgado Searl says groups like her own need to pay attention to those cultural nuances.

“If you cater to the upscale, acculturated volunteer, then you’re ignoring the people from the community that needs help,” she says. “The average everyday man can do this, too.”