Politics & Government

Part 1: Councilmember Nancy Navarro on Latino Leadership

Patch asked Montgomery County Council Vice President Nancy Navarro about her vision for Latino leadership in Wheaton and the rest of Montgomery County.

 

Montgomery County Councilmember Nancy Navarro organized a on Jan. 28 for parents of MCPS students.

Patch interviewed her earlier this week about how she first became interested in building Latino leadership in Montgomery County, and how her office chose the parents who attended the invitation-only conference.

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Check back next week for Part 2 of the interview.

Patch: Councilmember Navarro, where did the idea for this conference spring from? 

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Previous to joining the public service world, I was the director of a non-profit organization working with the Latino community on issues of childcare, and from that we started a network of childcare providers. I always felt very strongly that there was a very powerful dynamic that emerges when you bring people together and have them work toward a common cause. There seemed to be a lot of interest in that. Fast forward to when I joined the Board of Education, I began to also notice that Latino parents were starting to come together at different schools to advocate for academic achievement for their children. 

A couple of times I went to speak to the parents, and I always had this intrigued curiosity about what would happen, when would be the right moment to begin to address a broader organizing component for parents, for the community at large to be more involved.

I’ve been in public office since 2004, and inevitably every time we have hearings on budgets or bills, you rarely see the face of Montgomery County reflected in the people who come to testify. That’s always been an interesting thing for me because looking at the numbers, there’s changing demographics, but I don’t see the same representation present whenever we’re making a decision about a master plan or land use.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while and last year I had the opportunity to speak to a number of these Latino parents from the Northeast consortium. We came together and we had a dialogue for two hours about everything, from safety in the schools, bullying, to access to public transportation, the availability of public housing, issues in their community and neighborhood, code enforcement, etc.

They began to say things like, “We’d like to have more leadership training, and we’d like to become more involved at different levels." It occurred to me that they had been very active at their school building level but didn’t know how to best branch out to other areas that affect their everyday life, such as the process of the council considering a budget and how to express your views on that budget--all of those things that the average citizen understands that they can do (some more than others).

It’s not just something that’s limited to the Latino community. I think that there are a lot of people who are from this country who don’t understand that process. So, I think for a community that has been here now for over 30 years and is maturing more and more, it may be a bit more of a learning curve for how best to participate in the civic process.

That’s how the idea for this conference came about. The parents were very direct about their desire for support in this endeavor. So we said OK. It was a collaborative project, a public-private partnership. Everything was in-kind. The space was in-kind, the school system provided the simultaneous translation, and the speakers were all pro bono. It was an extraordinary day.

Patch: Why was Ana G. Mendez University chosen to host the conference?

I’m a strong believer that especially for the immigrant community, and specifically the Latino community, there’s a strong desire to pursue education at all levels. Sometimes, there are parents who are not quite sure how to do that. There are also a lot of adults within that community who would like to further their higher education and are not quite sure how to go about it. They might bring some credentials from their home country but are not quite sure how to do the equivalency here.

Ana G. Mendez is a newcomer to this area. It’s a fully accredited bilingual university, and they made it very clear that they want to be a staple in the community, like a community center if you will. They have a great space that sends the message of higher education, and they offered the space.

Patch: How did you select the parents?

I wanted to make sure that we had parents from the up-county schools, the down-county area, and the northeast area, where there’s a higher concentration of Latino parents. We did have a pretty even distribution. This was by invitation only, and these were parents who have already been committed to leadership. They’ve been meeting consistently, they have volunteered, they are already very involved with their schools--so they can be multipliers. They can be leaders and help launch a broader structure for civic representation.

Organizations like Impact Silver Spring forwarded us some names, but the bulk of the names came from the school system.


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