BALTIMORE (VR) – Peruvian Renzo González believed he was stuck in an endless cycle of low-pay manual labor jobs like screen printing t-shirts and catering. Not anymore.
Thanks to a Spanish-language computer literacy course targeted towards adult immigrants and sponsored by the William& Lanaea C. Featherstone Foundation in Baltimore, González has begun to realize the possibilities of work outside of manual labor and “in an office,” as he stated.
“Now I know how to do a resume,” Gonzáles, 32, told VR. “I didn’t really know how to do it before.”
Lanaea Featherstone, the president and co-founder of the foundation told VR that the program attended by González teaches “everything about how to use the computers from the basics, clicking on a mouse, right click, left click, to building tables in Microsoft Word and producing resumes and getting email accounts.”
Twenty students graduated March 15 from the pilot course. At the graduation ceremony all 20 students received laptops for their homes, plus Verizson internet cards with 3 months of free service.
González, who lives in Baltimore with his 4 year old daughter Jackelyn, said that the program would be instrumental in helping him to apply for new jobs as he had little knowledge of how to use a computer before the class, let alone Microsoft Word.
“I didn’t know I could get a template from Microsoft in the software and follow it,” he said. “And you can have a really nice resume!”
No ties
Featherstone often gets asked why she quit her career in journalism and started a foundation focused on helping Latino immigrants, since she is a Baltimore-born, Alabama raised African American woman with no Latino ancestry.
“I wanted to begin to change lives on a wider scale,” she said.
The foundation, she explained, has a two-part mission, which is to work with the Latino community and inspire minorities and underprivileged youth to learn more about global cultures. She said that the foundation provides free educational training programs for Latino immigrants in English language, computer literacy and financial literacy.
“By nature I’m a person that just wants to help people and… I’m passionate about the Latino community and the Spanish-speaking community,” Featherstone, 32, said. “They’re the nicest people in the world.”
She started running programs for Latino immigrants and receiving grants for individuals in the city in 2006 on a shoe-string budget. She said she would get “$4,000 here, $2,000 there” and then started to see that her programs were really starting to make a difference in people’s lives. In 2008, Featherstone, along with her husband, founded the William and Lanaea C. Featherstone Foundation to further expand her efforts.
Hardships
Featherstone said that when Latino immigrants come to the United States they are faced with many obstacles and barriers to living a normal life. They have language barriers that restrict them from communicating with the people around them and potential employers. Often times, immigrants don’t have the money to pay for ESL classes.
Another crucial disadvantage suffered by immigrants and underprivileged communities is a lack of access to technology, said Featherstone. According to the University of Southern California’s The Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, “Latino immigrants, comprising 46.6% of the US immigrant population, have some of the lowest levels of access to computers and the Internet”.
On the Horizon
Featherstone told Radio VR that one of her dreams is to send minority high school student’s overseas.
“When you travel abroad and you see that someone from one country speaks four different languages and then you come to the United States and see that our children are barely learning one language or not really taking it seriously… it’s shocking to me,” she added.
This idea is especially dear to her because she knows that there are so many minority students that want to go abroad but do not have the opportunity or resources to do so.
“We want to inspire minority youth to become global leaders,” she said.
