Giving Compass' Take:

• Mary Moran and fellow organizer Henry Jones founded Our Voice Nuestra Voz to help Latino parents advocate for the needs of their kids in the independent schools of New Orleans. 

• How could existing organizations step up to meet the needs of Latino students that are currently neglected around the country? How can other activists follow in Moran's footsteps to make an impact? 

• Learn how innovative financing can help close the racial wealth gap. 

Mary Moran headed up grassroots education lobbying campaigns in several states, including Louisiana, where she got to know members of several Latin American immigrant communities that had come to literally rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Because the city’s schools operated independently at the time, there were no schools where the Latino community was concentrated, so students with language barriers and other needs were going unserved.

What led you to start Our Voice/Nuestra Voz?

We started talking to [community groups that] had a grasp on all the services that were needed. It was clear that they weren’t going to take on education as a mission in the sense of starting to work with the public school system. And the education advocacy organizations that did exist weren’t going to start hiring Latino organizers.

So we quit our jobs without having funding — about six months later we got some — and have since been doing a lot of work around things that families and schools deal with every day, like translation issues.

Nuestra Voz has grown pretty quickly. Can you talk about the momentum?

Over the last 2½ years we have been able to build a base of parents who advocate for their children and for the city’s children. We have a bit over 2,500 members in our network. We have an organizing base — leaders who have gone through our program, who are active in our campaigns — of about 200 parents.

One of our very first campaigns was called 4WARD. We trained parents to survey other parents. We created a survey with 400 parents and created a community report that then helped us talk to policymakers, school leaders, and other folks in the system who wanted to learn more about this newer population of students and families.

Read the full article on activists creating accountability by Beth Hawkins at The 74.