My therapist once told me that we are nothing more than a collection of energy going through a shared human experience. We, as individuals, don't get to leave much behind other than the odd photo, a random journal we kept, the stories people tell about us, and our collective impact.
This Hispanic Heritage Month, we celebrate this collective impact. We believe "unidos somos más" (together we are more). A united community is mandatory if we want to go through life and enjoy it while we still have the chance. We keep each other safe, we lift people up, we check in when things go bad, we celebrate each other's wins.
Growing up in a crowded Latino household, I was dependent on programs like SNAP and I had free and reduced lunch, but I never thought much of it. All I cared about was knocking on my neighbors door to see if they could come out and kick a ball around. My parents never mentioned finances around me but I knew it wasn't normal for them to switch between factory shifts at 3:00am in the morning. It wasn't until I moved away to college that I saw how much collective action had taken place just to get me through those campus doors.
What got me through those doors was not unique to me. Every person I grew up around was carried by some version of it, and plenty of them never got the chance to see where it could take them. This is why I went off looking to work with nonprofits that invest in and lift up everyday people.
Working with Mapscorps, an organization that taught Chicago Public Schools youth to understand their local neighborhoods through community asset data was a big step. In this field research work, we partnered with a diverse range of community organizations and schools across Chicago.
I distinctly remember partnering with the Emerald South Economic Development Collaborative in Washington Park to address infrastructure deficits like potholes, broken sidewalks, and overgrown foliage. To tackle this problem, us nerds in the group found and adapted an existing Esri software that was able to log events in real time. This helped our high school youth come together and compare what the city has on their 311 reports vs what was actually going on in their front yards. When we put all this data on a map it was abundantly clear that we all shared the same day to day problems based on our geographic location regardless of the language we spoke or what our parents did for a living.
On top of that infrastructure project, we, as advocates, personally walked our own community areas to collect and identify information on the grocery stores, hospitals, businesses, and transportation assets around Chicago's South and West side neighborhoods. During these field work sessions, our team of researchers found many more food deserts than we expected to see. It was no surprise that some of these areas, mostly made up of Black and Brown residents, also had increased rates of diabetes and negative health outcomes.
Just like with the infrastructure work, we weren't just discovering a shared problem, we were proof that a shared solution was possible. Unidos somos más isn't only about the struggle we have in common, it's the strength we get from tackling it together.
That thread led me to No Kid Hungry. Feeding a child today is not complicated. It is the least a country this wealthy can do, and it is the reason many people like that kid I once was can focus on school and playing outside. Not because of what they might achieve in the future but simply because they deserve a balanced life.
As a digital products associate, I get the privilege of working directly with our donation campaigns, wrangling together and cleaning data pipelines. Having recently graduated from Northwestern University with a Masters of Science in Data Science, I am now the first in my family to have graduated from high school, undergraduate, and graduate school. I am no different than most people out there and there is so much talent that doesn't get the chance to thrive because they have to work a double shift or they have to help their parents with bedside care or any other number of factors. Removing a household barrier like feeding hungry children can have a rippling effect on even an adult's everyday life.
I know nobody goes through life alone, I don't think anybody does or anybody can. This Hispanic Heritage Month's theme embraces our shared experiences through intersectionality and collective action. Cuando estamos unidos, we can do so much more.
