Center for Health Equity Language Justice Workgroup

The Center for Health Equity facilitates a Language Justice Workgroup, which was initially created in 2021 to advise DPH on key strategies to improve our DPH service delivery to highly impacted communities that have language access barriers. This included addressing key operational challenges related to developing and disseminating culturally, linguistically and literacy-appropriate resources related to the COVID-19 response and recovery.

Since then, the Language Justice Workgroup has continued to meet to expand on the many vital recommendations they provided to us during COVID-19.

The workgroup is comprised of 15 members from a diverse group of community-based organizations.

*	Danny Olvera  - Operations Coordinator, Braille Institute	*	Elena Nourrie - Executive Director, So'oh - Shinali Sister Organization
*	Alex Salazar - Program Operations Supervisor, Tarzana Treatment Centers	*	Yesenia Rodriguez - Social Media Marketing Specialist, Child Care Resource Center
*	Heng Lam Foong - Co-Division Director, Asian Pacific Islander Forward Movement	*	Narineh Assatouri - Supervisor, Armenian Relief Society
*	An Le - Assistant Director, Community Building and Engagement, Little Tokyo Service Center	*	Nan Ding - Director, Access to Prevention Advocacy, Intervention and Treatment
*	Mireya Monuz - Program Director, PALS for Health	*	Senait Admassu - Director, African Coalition
*	Jacinto (Joey) Contreras - Deputy Director, Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness Inc. (GLAD)	*	Hina Ahmed - Deputy Director, South Asian Network
*	Odilia Romero - Director, Cielo	*	Lorraine Tuala Logoai - Program Manager, Southern California Pacific Islander Community Response Team
*	Chanchanit Martorell - Founder & Executive Director, Thai Community Development Center

Language Justice Workgroup Recommendations

The Language Justice Workgroup provided DPH with various recommendations related to the following topics:

* Increase staff Training

* Work more with Community-Based Organizations

* Create Glossaries and Style Guides

* Use Social Media

* Improve Contracts and Master Agreements

* Update Threshold Languages to more accurately reflect communities

Guided by these recommendations, the Center for Health Equity was able to:

* Create an online portal (the Hub for Interpretation and Translation, or HIT system) to make it simpler and more efficient for DPH staff to request translation and interpretation services.

* Train DPH staff on how to use this online process.

* Drastically increase the number of documents that have been translated (2,985 documents in the fiscal year 2023-2024, compared to 2,226 documents translated in the two fiscal years of 2020-2022).

* Provide over 37,000 minutes of oral and Sign Language interpretation in the fiscal year 2023-2024.

* Start creation of  standardizing glossaries and style guides across our threshold languages.

* And so much more!

 

Contact Information:

For additional questions or comments please reach out to: DPHLANGUAGESERVICES@PH.LACOUNTY.GOV