Serving Immigrant Clients: Family Perspectives on the Challenges and Solutions

So we're going to start with Elizabeth Gomez.

Elizabeth is a parent of two children served by regional censors, and she'll tell you a little bit more herself.

But she's also the director and co-founder of the Integrated Community Collaborative, which works primarily with Spanish-speaking families to help them navigate systems.

And take it away, Elizabeth.

Hi, good morning, everyone.

First, I'd like to say thank you to Judy Mark for inviting me to share my perspective as a parent here in this panel.

And I'm also very just overwhelmed by the amount of information that this conference has provided.

So it gives me the opportunity to share a little bit about myself.

So thank you.

So I am a mother of two young adults served by the regional center system.

My oldest son has Down syndrome and my youngest son is on the autism spectrum.

So I am also going to share my perspective, not only as a parent, but also as having had the opportunity to be the director of the Integrated Community Collaborative and also consider myself an integradora.

Also has given me the opportunity to not only share this morning on my personal experience, but also of many people that we help and support in the community.

So the the ICC is a parent to parent.

parent organization.

It's a nonprofit that helps the Latino community navigate the complex systems of support.

Specifically, the regional center systems is where we spend a lot of our time, but we also support families in other meetings like in the school districts or even other systems that they are navigating.

But what brings me to my conversation today is to share with you during these times that our community is going through this difficult situation, specifically the Latino community is impacted completely with a lot of the immigration situations currently affecting them.

the tremendous amount of fear that is affecting the families is very concerning to us and mostly because as we are what we're seeing is we're seeing that families are staying in home they're not really allowing a lot of their children to be in the community they're afraid of mostly being separated from them and most of our families have children who are actually U.S. citizens who should be able to and have the right to engage and have all these services that they're entitled to.

But for the reasons that I'm discussing with you, what we're seeing today is actually something that is impacting them a lot.

It is very heartbreaking because we know that they need the services.

We know that they are in need of even more supports now more than ever.

But instead, what we see is that they're actually not accessing the services.

So I want to tell you a little bit more about what we do.

So at the Integrated Community Collaborative, we attend meetings with them.