By MARTIN MCCONNELL
PUBLISHED: March 11, 2023 at 5:30 PM EST
For a 25th anniversary, the Lorain County Coalition for Hispanic/Latino Issues and Progress (CHIP) decided an annual leadership conference had to be in person.
After multiple years without a time to get together, the group’s brass decided that March 2023 was the right time to revive their yearly gathering.
According to CHIP trustee and former conference director Michael Ferrer, about 30% of Lorain County speaks Spanish in some form. For years, the county has had the largest Hispanic population in the state of Ohio, he said.
He explained that on March 11, that population finally had a place to meet, join hands with each other, and educate both themselves and the wider community about important issues facing the Hispanic and Latino community.
“It’s been three years next month, it normally happened in April,” Ferrer said of the conference. “It’s been three years and we resisted every single call to have a virtual conference… Our conference is really all about the front line workers.”
Online meetings weren’t going to cut it, Ferrer said. The leadership group’s
logic was that a virtual conference would never get the message of appreciation for the front line worker across properly.
“We can’t do that virtually. We have to be there and let them know, fifty times, walking around, that we appreciate you,” he said. “We care about you (and) we thank you… This way, it shows what we’re about.”
This year’s conference developed six main themes, according to Ferrer. The top priority, he said, was human trafficking, or “sexploitation.”
“A new statistic just came out that was so shocking to us, that we’re now going to focus on that for the next three years,” Ferrer said. “Right before COVID and during COVID, 41% of all the people being trafficked are being trafficked by a family member or someone very close to them… That means that even during COVID, when you couldn’t leave the house, you were being exploited.”
In response, the conference featured human trafficking survivors as one of its featured speakers. Prominent conference talks on the subject will continue into the next few years.
According to Ferrer, the conference also tackled other issues. Among them
were community engagement, mental health issues due to the coronavirus
pandemic, and Latina empowerment.
“Latina empowerment is a big one for us,” he said. “It’s such a big thing, about empowering the women in our community… During COVID, I think our community survived because of women. (We continue) to empower young women.”
Each of the main themes had presenters on the conference’s main stage inside the conference center’s Hoke Theatre.
Outside of the main stage presentations, the conference’s main room was filled with tables highlighting programs run by the Hispanic and Latino community, for the Hispanic and Latino community.
Main room booths included the Spanish American Committee’s Latino
Construction Program, which features a six-week course for everything from introductions to unions, to OSHA 10 certification.
Classes start at 5:30 p.m. March 14, 15, and 16 at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, according to program contact Juan Carlos Medina. Hopeful attendees can reach Medina at 216-961-2100, extension 222.
Additionally, the Community Foundation of Lorain County Hispanic Fund
scholarship program, manned by Eileen Torres, hopes to bring much-needed funding to education in the community.
“We have instituted a new endowment, and we intend to add to the
endowment so we can serve more Latino students,” Torres said. “We believe that every Latino student that gets an education, walks out of poverty, that lifts the entire Latino community.”
Those looking to apply for the scholarship can do so at peoplewhocare.org, Torres said. Additionally, the conference’s back room featured Mercy Health, as well as other health-related sponsors, teaching on local medical fields and procedures with a focus on mental health.
Presenter Armando Telles noted in his speech that even in a relatively strong Latino community like Lorain County, members of that community can often feel like outsiders.
Still, he urged Hispanic and Latino youths to get out, vote in their local
elections, and create the change they wanted to see in the wider community, one of the main messages of the conference as a whole.
“Everywhere a person goes, if they didn’t grow up there, they’re an outsider; they’re not the local,” he said. “So it requires the local community to be reflective of the virtues of the values of any person that travels.”
This article originally published by The Morning Journal.