Our Projects
Latin American Cooking
Cocina Latina or Latin American Cooking is an alternative project for collecting funds. This project is carried out every two months and consists of cooking a typical dish from some Latin American country. These dishes are made by members of ILA with natural ingredients. The head chef is a native of the country where the dish originates and the helpers learn to prepare it.
This is a way to promote the culture by tasting authentic foods from these countries as well as sharing a sense of community, as different groups of people get together to share in a fraternal environment.
Book of Personal Histories
The Book of Personal Histories is a long term project that consists of collecting the authentic stories of immigrants, by means of personal interviews with some of the members of ILA. This will be a book of testimonies from people who, due to circumstances and fate, were forced to abandon their family and native country. Many of these stories will speak to us of the often dramatic odyssey they experienced getting to this country, the untold suffering, their dreams of a better life, and how they have fared here.
One of the objectives of this book is for the non-immigrant community to gain insight from authentic testimonies of immigrants, rather than from the myths that are so often perpetuated. For this reason, the book will also include appendices with tables and hard statistics concerning immigrants, what they provide for this country, and information that has been published in respected sources. Likewise, it will clarify the relationship between immigration and the economic system, and the true structural causes that force the people of Latin America to leave their native countries for survival or to escape the poverty in their communities.
Project Monarch
Why Project Monarch?
Project Monarch gets its name from the migratory Monarch butterfly, which is the best known example of the migration of butterflies. In Mexico the first news about the migration of the Monarchs dates back to 1975 when the place where they hibernate was found in the neo-volcanic mountains of the State of Michoacán. Every year toward the end of October when autumn arrives, millions of Monarch butterflies arrive in the forests of the State of Michoacán in southwestern Mexico, after the long trip of 2,500 miles from Canada and the northern U.S., in order to reproduce and then later return north in the middle of April. The migration of the Monarch butterflies is not the only such migration in the world, and in fact in practically all regions there are similar local migratory movements.
ILA supports the free movement of human beings who, like the Monarch butterflies, follow the fundamental laws of nature with it’s instinct for survival.
What is Project Monarch?
This project was created for the newly arrived immigrant, as well as for the immigrant who has lived here for several years but remains marginalized. The object of Project Monarch is to provide the tools for self-improvement for immigrants by means of community education, so that they themselves may ultimately develop as a community leader of human rights. Project Monarch is a program composed of three phases. Each phase takes 8 to 10 sessions, and the continuity of the group that has taken the first phase and progressed toward the second and third phase of this project is critical for ILA.
The Phases
The first phase of Project Monarch deals with the orientation of the immigrant community regarding their rights and how to utilize the services and resources available in the local area.
The second phase focuses on leadership education. The content is focused on leadership in the community, the legislative process, economic globalization, and related topics.
In the third and final phase the participants have a more active role as the training is focused on the actions and abilities of each one of them.
In this phase training skills touch on why civic participation is important, what lobbying is, and how to speak with the media, among the more noteworthy skills.
From its inception in April of 2005 until now, we have completed three initial phases, with the first two carried out in the Dolores Catholic Church and the third offered at Wooldridge Elementary School. The second phase will be carried out during the remainder of the year, and the third phase will be completed in 2008.
1304 East 6th Street, Ste. 3 • Austin, TX 78702 • (512) 474-2399