Ronnie Lovler
Those interested in combining fun with language and learning will have an opportunity to do so Saturday at the Matheson History Museum.
A free collage-making workshop is scheduled 4-6 p.m. as an interactive event that will help attendees understand about language access and why it is important.
Ethan Maia de Needell manages immigrant programs for the Gainesville Immigrant Neighborhood Inclusion Initiative (GINI), which was created last year to try and bridge some of the gaps. GINI works under the initiative of the Rural Women’s Health Project (RWHP) which continues to serve as the lead advocate and coordinator of the project.
“Immigrants make up 10 percent of our community and contribute millions of dollars in tax revenue each year,“ Maia de Nedell said. “Despite this, our public and private services have not reflected this segment of our population either through language access or other barriers that have not been addressed.”
GINI was instrumental in the creation of an exhibit that recently opened at the Matheson History Museum and focused on the presence of multilingual speakers in North Central Florida. Other participants include Language Access Florida, RWHP, and UF’s Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.
More recently, GINI and its collaborators put together another event at Working Foods in Gainesville centering on food and the idea that “the community that eats together stays together.”
Attendees sampled down home U.S. southern-style cooking, Puerto Rican delights and West African fusion foods prepared by local chefs.
Chefs included Daniel Mitchell of Daniel’s Dining, Ivan Perez of Taino Roots, Robert Colon of Working Food and Awa Caba and Aisse Kane, who together operate Flavorful, which serves West African fusion food.
If GINI is successful in getting more grant money, it plans for more tasting events with members of the local multi-ethnic community. But this weekend the focus will be on language.
“Through visuals, we can learn more about our languages and why they matter. In this interactive collage-making workshop, attendees will learn what language access means, why it matters, and how we as a community can better support multilingual speakers,” said Laura Gonzales, who helped organize the event.
Gonzales is one of the workshop facilitators along with Valentina Sierra Niño, Erika Hernández Cuevas, Laura Gonzales, and Robin Lewy. RWHP, Language Access Florida, and Intérpretes y Promotores Interculturales (Intercultural Interpreters and Promoters) will host this program.