When do you feel your most expressive and powerful? How are you communicating? Are you able to bring that part of you to your work for social change?
ICH has been the evaluation partner for CSHE, Community Solutions for Health Equity, a project that supports local community-based organizations to work for more equitable and community-responsive health and healthcare.The project is consciously working to model and create a radically inclusive, antiracist space.
Language justice has emerged as an important part of this project. In 2021, we wrote a blog post on facilitation techniques to foster language justice. During this time, we were learning about these techniques from our CSHE partners and had begun to apply this lens in our work. Since then, we’ve been applying what we learned to other projects, and have discussed our learnings at conferences, in college courses, and even on a podcast.
CSHE both encourages and models English/Spanish language justice. In this context, “language justice” is more than just “language access” – it’s not just about translation or interpretation but is tied to broader social justice goals of equity and antiracism. In conducting interviews with CSHE funded partners over the summer of 2023, we heard many people describing the most important elements of language justice:
We hope to continue learning from our project partners and other evaluators committed to promoting language justice through their work.
What can you do to further language justice in your work? Here are some tips based on our experience:
- Find a great interpretation contractor! We can enthusiastically recommend TLC Translation, our partners in CSHE. Although the acronym doesn’t stand for it, they do give us Tender Loving Care.
- Budget both time and money for translation. This includes every email you send out, every powerpoint presentation, and every written exercise you facilitate. This may require more planning, especially for the email communication, than you are used to. It is worth it!
- Interpreters are highly trained skilled professionals. Not every bilingual person can do interpretation! Be sure to go to the pros when planning for multilingual events.
- Do not underestimate the value of the multilingual people on your team. Even if they are not interpreters, they can informally correspond with participants, do small in-the-moment translations, and quality check the materials you get professionally translated.
- Convince your funders. It may require some work to explain to your funders why it is important to spend this extra time and money. Many funders will be more receptive when they learn that language justice is important in advancing their own priorities. For example, it is critical for the goal of advancing health equity to ensure we are not limiting our community engagement to just those fluent in English. This may be easier said than done, but the more different voices argue these points, the more mainstream they will become.