The Concilio was founded in 1981 and aims to unlock health, wealth and education opportunities for Latinos families.
grew up in a family a lot like the ones the organization serves. She and her family moved to the United States when she was 6 years old. Her parents didn’t go to school but focused on working towards a better life for her.
Growing up, Velasco Fortner saw how disenfranchised communities could succeed with just a bit of help. “When I came to Texas, I realized that there wasn’t a lot of systems and infrastructure in place for the Latino community to really succeed and help lift one another up,” Velasco Fortner said. “I've been for 17 years , we have been trying to quietly work with parents through parental engagement in the areas of health and education trying to help this community and others, because we serve all families, change the trajectory of the statistics.” Founded in 1981, the Concilio aims to provide and ease access to health, wealth and education opportunities for Latino families. The nonprofit has served about 250,000 people in the last 40 years and has seen health outcomes for 94% of the children who participated in its health program improve in six weeks. In education, 90% of the children whose parents participated in the agency’s Parents Advocating for Student Excellence program graduated from high school. “For me, it’s a dream job,” Velasco Fortner said. “What I do here is what I would do if I wasn’t the CEO. It’s my passion because I see my parents in the families that we serve. I believe that, especially here in Texas because we’re over 40% of the population in Dallas County, if we love North Texas, we have to pay attention to what's happening to this population and not pretend that we're not here.” about the organization’s recent State of Latinos report, how COVID impacted the agency and its clients and the importance of immigrants. We want to start a movement with the purpose of changing and expanding people's perspectives on the Latino community. We want to figure out how to share the great news but also highlight that there are ways that we can work on these disparities if we work together and find solutions. We want to have conversations and think tanks to get experts, community leaders and movers and shakers to come in and sit around the table and think about what we can do. It's not about the heart. It makes financial sense for us as Texans. If the GDP for Latinos is that high, but we're in poverty, imagine how much more we would contribute if our families weren't struggling as much as they are. What I would want the think tanks to do is prioritize and discuss what areas we want to focus on. What are the one or two in the areas of education, wealth and health that we really want to move the needle on, track and build a community dashboard? Together as a region and as a state, we can figure out how we can engage more nonprofits. How can we support the existing institutions that are working towards this? I want to make sure these decisions surface from conversations in think tanks so that it’s being led by the participants, stakeholders and the community. Once we make the decision on what areas we want to move the needle on, then really look at who else needs to be part of the table. Who else needs to be part of this conversation and then build strategies around that? The report also highlights the health care inaccessibility in the state and how COVID helped shine a light on that inaccessibility. How did COVID impact the organization and the people it serves? Around the same time as COVID, we were working on our strategic plan, and we always use data from multiple sources to figure out our direction. One of the sources is always the parents that we work with. What else can we do? How can we be better? What other services do you need? During the first three months of COVID, we picked up the phone and called every single family on our roster. We spoke to over 10,000 families, asking them, ‘Do you know how to protect yourself from COVID? How are you?’ After week four or six of lockdown, parents started to tell us, ‘We’re running out of food. We’re running out of supplies. We don’t have money.’ What we also learned is that organizations were not prepared to meet the demand of the Spanish-speaking population. We had to step in to help families with urgent needs. We had a mom who called and said she had three little ones. We gave her some resources, and she called back even more frustrated. One person said nobody there speak Spanish. Another one basically told her to call back next week because the person that is bilingual isn’t here until next week. As a result, we also launched a program we're calling Latino Capacity Building, which helping other organizations improve their capacity to serve the Latino population. It includes cultural competency training part of that is a report. We want to make sure we’re equipping nonprofits, other businesses and government agencies with actual data that help understand and better serve Hispanics in these three areas in education, health and wealth. It also includes the summit. We're calling it the Power of Latino Summit, where we're going to make decisions on what areas we want to put a stake in the ground and say, let's work towards solving these disparities. Whenever it could, I noticed that the report included data about U.S.-born and foreign-born Latinos. Tell me more about the decision to include both when you could. It’s part of changing the narrative. Sometimes immigrants don’t have the best narrative around us. We wanted to tell the story with data points. You can’t argue with data. We wanted to make sure we highlighted the importance of immigrants. We’ve come here because we want a better life. We want that American dream. We want a world where you can succeed and create a better life for your children. One of the things that I say in my speeches when I'm talking to parents is my dad told me. He started working when he was five years old, and he taught himself how to read and write. His handwriting was awful. He could barely sign his name. He told me he saw his job as a father as to stand up as tall as he could and then put me on his shoulders so that I could see further than he ever could. That’s the immigrants in America. We may not see it that way, but that’s what we do for children. We want our children to do better than us. For me, sharing those data points about the contributions was important but also personal. This report is about how do we share and tell our story through data. Then if you notice, we had a couple of stories in there as to why some of the parents that we were working with don't have health insurance. Or why they don't have a retirement plan. We tried to weave those stories into the report as well to paint a more true picture as to why some of them are in the situation that they're in. It’s not because they're lazy. It's not because they're bad people. It's not because they're trying to milk the system. It's because the circumstances that they're in don’t allow them to do
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