Healthy Community Focus Group for non-English speaking families in the rural Snoqualmie Valley

Grantee: Empower Youth Network
Timeframe: October 2022 – December 2022 | Amount: $11,500

Empower Youth Network was recently awarded funding from King County’s Department of Community and Human Services’ County-wide Expanded Behavioral Health Services in Rural King County Grant to hire a .5 FTE Language Access Coordinator to support overall implementation of the organization’s Culturally Responsive Engagement Plan to better meet the needs of the Snoqualmie Valley’s every expanding cultural diversity. The core responsibilities of this role include:

• Lead community-based listening sessions to discover how culturally and linguistically diverse community members would like to be engaged and determine needs gaps
• Coordinating with school districts and other community-based organizations to implement culturally responsive programing
• Support efforts to provide cultural parity in parents/student psycho-education and programing
• Maintaining a database of qualified interpreters and translators
• Training staff on how to utilize language assistance services when serving customers
• Coordinating and managing requests for interpretation and translation
• Managing a budget to provide language assistance services

This work begins with the community-based listening sessions to ensure EYN is centering the diverse voices of rural King County. If funded, this grant would provide the costs to underwrite three, 2-hour listening sessions in the Snoqualmie Valley including one session in upper valley areas of Snoqualmie/North Bend, one in mid-valley unincorporated area of Fall City, and one session representing the lower valley of Carnation/Duvall.

These funds will cover the expenses for three listening sessions for non-English speaking families, first starting with our Spanish-speaking valley residents. The listening sessions will run for two hours and include provisions for child care and child activities, gift certificates for participants to compensate them for their time, as well as funding for food, facility rental fees, and translation/interpretation services. The interpretation services will include a translation app similar to Boostlingo to support non-English speaking families.

The specific activities will be the Community Focus Groups/listening sessions to gain understanding of the best ways to serve the diverse needs of the community. The sessions will be organized and led by EYN’s Language Access Coordinator. EYN has a strong relationship with the two valley-area school districts – Riverview and Snoqualmie Valley School Districts, as well as the King County Library System. The King County Library System’s Carnation and Duvall Public Library branches recently partnered with Empower Youth Network to improve literacy, bridge the summer learning gap, and promote reading in underserved communities in the Snoqualmie Valley. Through this current partnership we are able to reach communities that are marginalized and hard to serve due to cultural and linguistic barriers.