El Comité hopes Friday fundraiser fuels expanded services

LONGMONT — The leader of a 44-year-old organization serving Longmont’s Latino community that was formed in the wake of a potentially incendiary incident hopes that a Friday fundraising event will help it expand its services to meet an exponentially growing need.

“It just takes people and money — and space,” said Lisa Moreno, who became executive director of El Comité de Longmont last November.

Operating out of 1,200 square feet at 455 Kimbark St. with three — going on four — paid staff members, four part-time workers and a legion of volunteers, El Comité takes on an overflowing plate of tasks including citizenship classes, English as a Second Language training, notary services, attorney consultations, document translations, work permits, green-card renewals, case management, driver’s license renewals, referrals to government agencies and more.

El Comité also holds health fairs, such as the one scheduled for 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Aug. 10 at Heart of Longmont Church, 11th Avenue and Emery Street, where health-related workshops will be held, free physical examinations will be offered for school sports and the Boulder County Department of Health will dispense vaccinations.

El Comité’s targets aren’t just limited to Longmont’s Latino community and migrant workers from Mexico, Moreno said. “We also have a growing population from Central America, Peru and Venezuela.”

She would love to expand El Comité’s reach to include more outreach to the city’s Anglo community, as well as state-level legislative advocacy, but said “we just don’t have the staff for it. When you’re under-resourced, you stay focused on meeting the needs right in front of you.”

To build those resources, El Comité will hold a “Visions of Cultures” fundraiser from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday at Ollin Farms, 8627 N. 95th St. in Longmont, including appetizers made from the farm’s produce, a silent auction, music, testimonials and a cultural market. Event sponsors include Ollin Farms, Pumphouse Brewing, High Plains Bank, La Mariposa restaurants, GVC Capital LLC, The Tree Farm, Edwina Salazar and the Patzkowsky family. Tickets at $100 each are still available and can be purchased here.

Moreno’s wish list is as long as one of Ollin Farms’ plowed rows.

“I would really like to figure out how to support more integration between our immigrant and non-immigrant communities,” she said. “It’s hard when you’re not an English speaker and are forced to hang out with others like you instead of the dominant culture. It’s hard to reach out to the people who speak the language you want to learn.”

Moreno said she also sees a “huge need for legal support. What we’ve given people has to become more stable and grow. If we could get accredited by the Department of Justice, we’d be able to exponentially increase access to legal services for low-income people in the community. Right now, the demand far exceeds our ability to provide it, and all the forms we file are $500 and above.”

One daunting legal issue in the Latino community is “when our people take a job with a contractor and then the contractor doesn’t pay them,” Moreno said. “We see a lot of wage-theft cases, and there’s not a lot of resources for subcontractors. We’d like to do some work around prevention, and we probably need a direct-action team around wage theft.”

Helping people gain U.S. citizenship is a vital part of the organization’s work, Moreno said, “and we have a great and very dedicated volunteer group that helps people prepare for citizenship exams. But again, we could have more people in class if we had more capacity.

“There’s also more need for English classes than classes that exist.”

Underlying it all are some old wounds that are slow to heal.

The seeds of El Comité were planted on the night of Aug.14,1980, when two Latino teenagers were shot and killed by a Longmont police officer during an altercation after a traffic stop. The policeman was later acquitted of manslaughter charges. The Latino community was outraged, but a situation that could have led to violence instead resulted in the formation of El Comité three months later. It helped start a fund for the families of the dead teens and helped organize a candlelit vigil and march to let members of the Longmont City Council know that relations between the police and the public needed to be reformed.

Although stories of racism that date back to the days of the Ku Klux Klan in Longmont a century are still passed down, Moreno said, “I think times have changed. Longmont has done an amazing job in increasing diversity among city staff.”

The problems that remain, she said, largely revolve around “barriers keeping people from getting the services they need.” For El Comité, she added, “it can be really difficult to be constantly advocating for people who feel what they contribute is undervalued. It’s easy to become less open to partnership and more circling the wagons, being more of a scrapper than a partner.”

Still, she said, “we have more allies in the community as well. I think that’s an evolution over time for the community and the organization.”

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