Araceli Ramirez felt lost when her 5-year-old son Abraham was diagnosed with autism two years ago. The Modesto-area mother of four didn’t know much about the disorder or how to get her son help due to the lack of support for Latino families accessing disability services in California.

“I felt like, ‘What do I do now? Where are the resources?'” Ramirez said in an interview. “Estaba desesperada,” she said. “I was at my wit’s end.”

It wasn’t until Ramirez discovered a nonprofit called Escuchen Mi Voz, which means listen to my voice, that she got the services her son needed. A community health worker with the nonprofit helped her with the “complicated, difficult and tedious” processes to enroll her son in the therapy and recreational classes he’s entitled to under state law.

“I was unaware of all that,” she said.

Ramirez’s situation is not uncommon. Rather, it is emblematic of the difficulties of Latino families accessing disability services in California.

Nonprofits Help Address Inequities in Accessing Disability Services for Latino Families

Nonprofits like Escuchen Mi Voz are among the dozens of state grant-funded initiatives that try to bridge the gaps facing Latino families accessing disability services, sometimes in inventive ways, like dispatching mobile offices to rural Central Valley communities to assess and enroll people who require services.

But it’s unclear how effective these initiatives may be. Disability rights advocates say the initiatives, alone, don’t address root causes of the inequitable access to services. Part of the challenge, they say, is that the state’s publicly-funded, privately-operated disability service system has a lot of discretion to set their own rules and interpretations of state law.

“While these grants have enabled many community-based organizations to undertake worthy projects in their local areas, at the end of the day, their effectiveness in addressing racial disparities has been limited,” said Vivian Haun, a senior policy attorney for Disability Rights California, an advocacy nonprofit supporting Latino families accessing disability services.

Read the full article about Latinos' access to disability services by Melissa Montalvo at Disability Scoop.