Voces Unidas was recently awarded a three-year grant by The Colorado Health Foundation to build Latino power in the Roaring Fork and Colorado River valleys through health equity. These funds will support our leadership, advocacy, and civic engagement programming and help increase our capacity as the first Latino-created, Latino-led, and Latino-serving non-profit in our region.
“The Colorado Health Foundation is pleased to support the important work of Voces Unidas as it ties closely with our mission to improve the health of Coloradans,” said Senior Program Officer Chris Bui. “Organizations like Voces Unidas are the key to a healthier Colorado for its people and communities because of their ground-up approach to tackling complex community issues.”
Under our health equity work, Voces Unidas organizes Latinos to unleash the collective power of our local leaders to address systemic inequities in access to healthcare, housing, and food insecurity.
“Addressing longstanding health inequities is key to the success and progress of our communities in the Mountain Region,” said co-founder and Executive Director Alex Sànchez. “We are grateful for this multi-year commitment from a partner like The Colorado Health Foundation because it allows grassroots organizations to have the capacity to create more impactful, long-term systemic change.”
Voces Unidas will launch the Líderes Institute to equip leaders with the soft and hard skills needed to be even more effective advocates in their own community. Workshops will be offered to help leaders understand how to navigate government and community systems and how they can use different levers and strategies to drive change.
Our leader-led advocacy campaigns mobilize Latinos and allies on health equity issues that impact the community. Actions will include educating policymakers, engaging elected officials, signing petitions with specific calls to action, sharing stories and publishing opinion pieces to raise awareness, and others.
For the 2020 election, Voces Unidas is already engaging close to 7,800 Latino voters to learn how they feel about health equity issues as they get ready to vote. Preliminary data from our first round of canvassing efforts already suggest that Latino voters see access to healthcare and COVID-19 as top issues during the 2020 election.
