Serving the Mid-County: A Q&A with Natalie Cantor, Part 3

Natalie Cantor has spent the past 26 years of her career working in the County's Services Centers and the past 16 as Director of the Mid-County Center. Cantor, a fixture at Wheaton events and committee meetings, is retiring at the end of the month, amid major organizational changes at the Services Center. 

Wheaton Patch sat down with Cantor to ask about living and working in Wheaton, and how her job and the area has changed.

( and of this interview)

What has been successful for you in reaching out to residents who don’t speak English? What can the county as a whole learn from Wheaton’s experience?

Going back to , and this is before we had - it was the early 90s - it was before we had a more organized county effort reaching out to people who speak a language other than English. There was no office organized to do it, and now there is, and that’s been very helpful.

We talked it over with the Main Street people and they hired, subcontracted with people who were culturally and language-appropriate, when we were doing our visioning process. They would go over to the mall on heavy shopping days and they would on a one-on-one basis, they would speak to the Spanish-speaking people who really couldn’t communicate or for whatever reason didn’t want to communicate in English, about what they wanted to see happen in this downtown. It was very very labor intensive because it was one-on-one, but we pursued it and we got a very good sampling that was then pulled into the larger communities’ responses and factored in. I’m very proud of that, and like I said, it was an extremely intense effort.

But there was another thing I got involved in that I kind of think is the way to go, not just for Spanish-speaking people, but with every new language group. About five or six years ago, I’d heard about a program that Health and Human Services ran which was called Health Promoters, Prometores, in Spanish. I heard the program was for bringing health information to the Spanish-speaking community - front-line health information that they weren’t getting again because in many instances Spanish-speaking people came from countries as political refugees or other kind of refugees and they were afraid of working with a government. The thought was to bring the information to them, in a completely non-threatening way. [It] wasn’t my idea, believe me.

These health promoters were recruited from their own communities, [they were] practically always women, although there were a few men. These were people who loved their small communities, whether they lived in an apartment house, or elsewhere, and they were often stay-at-home mothers. They were paid a small stipend, a gift certificate or something to help defray their costs and by Health and Human Services, they were trained in, let us say, something like, diabetes, what to look for in diabetes.

And then they would meet with their own community. Sometimes they would knock on doors, other times they would call people and they would get the word out. I started thinking about it, and I thought, wouldn’t this be great if we could use this concept to get the word out on other programs as well? And just by good fortune, we have a management program in the county and I became the mentor of the woman who ran this program, in Health and Human Services. And we discussed if we could use this concept, use some of the prometores to push out other information.

And we did it. Once was when we were trying to get community input on the new . And that garage, going back five years, it’s in an area, that’s very heavily Hispanic. When we called the community in the first time, to let them know that, number one, that this is happening, there’s going to be a massive new structure, and it’s going to change the way people walk to work. We wanted to find out what people wanted to see. Do they want call boxes, are their afraid that there’s going to be dark areas that might appear unsafe? Do they want to have a children’s playground there? What do they want to see?

But we had no Hispanics at that first meeting. I’m really compressing this but we decided to use the good works of the prometores. Many of them lived in this community and they passed the word and they said we’re going to have another meeting, I need to you to come and tell your neighbors to come, we’ll be there to translate for you, and interpret. It was very very successful. We had a large number of Spanish-speaking people come. We did have translators there. Again, their ideas were then incorporated and made part of the final plan.

Then we were changing the whole parking situation on this parking lot [Parking Lot 13] a few years back, because we were having, particularly on Saturdays, people who were double parking and triple parking and they were getting very very big traffic tickets. We were going to have to crack down, which we did, and we were going to have to change the nature of parking, for example, paying on Saturdays.

I asked [the prometores], to come out on several Saturdays, speak to people, before this all happens, give them literature, which we had translated. And it worked perfectly. I mean, people had been getting into fistfights on this parking lot before.

You need to go to people. That’s the lesson. It’s very labor intensive, but you can reach people where they are, where they are at a particular time and place, and then they hear your message. You can’t expect them to come to where you are, literally and figuratively. You’ve got to go to them.

The other lesson I learned is that you really don’t need all kinds of fancy high paid interpreters, or specialists. Every community has people in it who want to help, and you’ve got to harness that help and send it out into the community. It works.

What are you looking forward to in retirement?

I think that’s the hardest question you’ve asked me. I don’t know. The first thing I’m looking forward to doing is turning off my alarm clock.

I’m looking forward to finding courses I want to take. There have been so many things over the years that I’ve said to myself, if only I had the time to learn that.  love literature, I’d love to take some literature classes again, some literary criticism. Even though I’m a bit older now, I want to learn how to ride a horse, and I think I may very well go over and do that. I want to be able and go over to the gym everyday. I go a few days a week now, but I’d love to be able to do it everyday.

I’m very type A and I think my fear going into retirement is that I’m going to have to create a new structure for myself, which is what I’ve done all these years, but I know I will. There’s going to be some fits and starts. I’d like to volunteer in some different kinds of boards that I haven’t been able to do, that’s about it. Travel a bit more.

Are you going to be involved in selecting your replacement?

I won’t be formally involved but I already have been asked for my input on what it takes to do this job. I know that my boss, the County Executive, will talk to me about that.

What are the important skills that a replacement should have?

I think that the person has to be able to see two sides to a story. It gets back to what I was saying about walking that fine line. There are always two sides to a story. You cannot say just because the county government has this philosophy that everybody here has to adhere to it, and vice versa, just because a community sees something that doesn’t mean the county government has to accept that. But even on the relatively minor issues, a neighborhood dispute, there’s always two sides.

If you’re sitting here, you often have to be A, a detective, find out what’s really going on and B, understand people have a right to their emotions. If there’s any issues, it’s not just a technical, or ideological issue, it's always emotional, there’s always emotional things going on.

You have to learn, or have the wisdom, and wisdom is an acquired thing, to factor in that there’s going to be heat around things. You have to deal with that heat as much as you deal with the facts on the ground. So I think being able to work with people to help them see that there is more than one part than what they’re bringing. I think you have to be a people person, and you have to be able to step back.

You can’t hit the ground running because an awful lot of this job is acquired wisdom. You can’t do a good job sitting in this seat the first year. You’ve got to acquire what’s going on, and you’ve got be patient with that. I think that those human skills are the more important aspect of this job, certainly technical skills help, understanding county code, urban planning ideas, but they are secondary to being able to work with people. It’s all about people.