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00:08 Jackie Strohm: Welcome to PA Centered, a podcast designed to help listeners be a part of the solution to end sexual harassment, abuse and assault. Each episode, we will take on a topic or a current event to help spark conversation and break down barriers to building communities free from sexual violence.

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00:33 JS: Hi everyone. I'm Jackie Strohm, the Prevention Resource Coordinator at the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape. I'll be your host today as we're joined by PCAR Language Access Coordinator, Damary Rodriguez, Community Advocacy Coordinator, Tatiana Piper, and Training Projects Coordinator, Karen Galbraith, to talk about language access. Welcome everyone.

00:54 Karen Galbraith: Hi Jackie.

00:56 Damary Rodriguez: Hi Jackie.

01:00 Tatiana Piper: Hi Jackie.

01:00 JS: To get started Karen, I'm wondering if you can tell us what language access is and why it's so important.

01:07 KG: Sure, thanks Jackie. So I think ultimately, when we talk about language access and the work that we do, the reason it's so important is because we want to provide access to support and services and prevention to all people. To all survivors of sexual violence. And if we don't provide meaningful language access, that means that we're not meeting that goal, we're not meeting that mission of serving all survivors and their families and our community, so we wanna make sure that we are doing everything that we can to reach everyone, no matter what language they speak or how they communicate. So ultimately, one of the main reasons why language access is important to the work that we do is because it's the law.

01:54 KG: So the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination, which is based on national origin, and later there were court rulings that determined that under the umbrella of national origin fell language and language access. So any of us who are receiving any type of federal funding or funding that originated with the federal government is obligated under the law to provide meaningful language access. So that's sort of the box checking reason why we all want to be providing it, but we also, of course, wanna be providing language access because of the moral and ethical obligations behind it. Again, it's our mission to serve all survivors. We wanna be making sure our prevention messages are reaching all corners of our communities, particularly those folks that are most marginalized, which very often includes people with limited English proficiency or people with disabilities who may not communicate in the same way as our centers are used to providing services, so we wanna make sure that we're finding ways to be creative and to provide that access for all survivors.

03:05 KG: And when I talk about access, it's not just about maybe a counseling appointment, which of course is very, very important, and we wanna be providing language access for those, but it's also about making sure materials are translated and trans-created so that anybody who picks up a brochure can read that brochure and get that information in a way that they understand best. We also wanna make sure that language access is available for folks who use sign languages. It's not just about spoken languages, but again, thinking about how everyone in our community... Or everyone in our communities might be communicating and might best be able to receive the important information and services that rape crisis centers are providing.

03:51 KG: So, again, it's not just about our services, but of course we wanna make sure that our core services are being provided with language access in mind, but also very often rape crisis centers are the gateways to other services in our community. So whether that's providing access to medical care or access to justice, we wanna be sure that we're able to provide survivors with all of their options and also to help educate our community partners about their obligations as far as language access goes. So making sure that our medical providers and hospitals understand their responsibilities as far as providing language access. That our law enforcement organizations and our courts understand their obligations. And again, this isn't just about what we have to do to be compliant with the law, it's really about meeting our mission, making sure that survivors can receive the services and no matter where they go and whatever services they decide are gonna be best for them.

04:56 KG: While it is important to do what we're supposed to do legally, it's maybe in some ways more important for us to be keeping in mind those important sort of moral and ethical obligations that we all have as part of our missions. The other thing we talk a lot in our movement about trauma-informed services and the importance of being trauma-informed. I think we all agree that many of the folks that we're working with have experienced some sort of trauma in their past and are continuing to work through that. And one of our goals is to always work to mitigate those impacts and also to prevent further harm and to prevent further trauma.

05:35 KG: And one of the ways that we can do that is to provide survivors with services that they can participate in in whatever language they're most comfortable expressing themselves. And so we know that for somebody with... In their primary language, they may be able to express themselves more fully and more completely than they can in maybe a newer language for them, and so it's also important to remember that language access isn't just for folks that can't speak any English, for example, it's also for people that may be just feel more comfortable in one language versus another language. Even if somebody can communicate to some degree in English, that doesn't mean that they wouldn't benefit or choose to communicate or receive services in another language, so we always wanna make sure that we're checking in with folks and not making assumptions on their behalf about how they like to receive services.

06:34 DR: I think those are really all great points, Karen. I think too, especially as you talk about being trauma-informed, I think it's also really important to think about how language access is connected to anti-racism work. That's something within the last few years, I think our movement has really talked a lot about. In order to end sexual violence and sexual assault abuse and harassment, we have to end all forms of oppression. And I think the big focus particularly has been around around racism and then anti-racism work, how to dismantle racism within our institutions.

07:14 DR: And one of the things that... I can say this anecdotally, but I think even statistically, language access often impacts communities of color. So Black, indigenous and other people of color, often receive less access to services because of the barriers that are in place around language. So if you are committed to ending sexual violence, if you are committed to racial justice work, you have to also be committed to language access work, and vice versa. If you're doing one and not the other, it's an incomplete picture because of how often... It doesn't always impact communities of color, but by and large, it does. I think particularly about some of the cases that have come out in the last few years.

08:04 DR: There was one in New York, which I think a lot of folks know about, where a survivor of domestic violence had filed a police report, her police reports went un-translated and her partner killed her and her children. That case caused a lot of changes within the NYPD, and they started contracting with a language services company to make sure that they provide interpretation 24/7. But there was actually a case that was local, actually in Pittsburgh, there was... In the school district there, so not in our movement but adjacent. There was a family, a Somali family, who spoke Bantu who their child was disabled and needed special education classes, was not receiving those services, and then additionally was not getting the language access services that they needed, and they eventually filed a lawsuit against that school district and won, and then received the services that they needed. But what we wanna try to prevent is for things getting to that point. So if we are being proactive, if we're making sure that we're providing language access because it's the law, we won't have to end up going to those lengths.

09:25 JS: Thank you both for explaining all of that. So we're here today to talk about how PCAR approaches language access. And so, Tatiana, could you talk to us a little bit about what that has looked like? 

09:39 TP: Absolutely. So before diving into that question fully, I think history is important, and that history starts with just PCARs, realizing that centers were struggling with answering the question during hotline calls, or hotline checks that we do every year, of how would you answer a hotline if someone spoke a language other than English? And also in realizing that our centers were struggling answering that question, PCAR wasn't sure either, and that's when it came important that we seeked technical assistance from someone in our organization that knew what they were doing. And that's when we went to Casa de Esperanza to seek that TA, and what they ended up doing for us is really just walking us through the language access plan process, and in that we created a Core Core Group that was a dedicated group of people that really wanted to see PCAR have a language access plan. And we also involved someone from each department. So someone from our training and technical assistance team, someone who was connected to our CEO and CEO's office, also someone who was in fiscal communication.

10:58 TP: So that language access wasn't just touching a group of people who were dedicated and were pushing for the change and pushing for the expansion of knowledge, but it also was important to include everyone that had something to do with how we provide services, how well we function as an organization, because the important part about language access, is that every part of our business, every part of how we exist needs to be infiltrated with understandings of why language access is important, how to actually successfully provide our services. And as a coalition our services are very different than that of a rape crisis center, but it's also important that we know what our services are and know where it's important for us to have language access integrated. And so additionally, what we realize and what the Casa de Esperanza, the TA they gave us was that we needed to be checking in monthly about our language access process and about our language access updates.

12:17 TP: So that more started as a meeting with the Core Core Group, and that soon transitioned to, "Actually, we need to be having these monthly meetings with everyone in the coalition, so that everyone is getting the same information, and we're all able to problem solve together and also learn together and continue this process." Because our language access plan isn't just a one-and-done tool, a one-and-done document, our language access plan is an ongoing process, and one that goes month to month, we change things up, we realize what's working, what's not working. We've developed one protocol and realized, "Actually no one's using this, so what can we do differently so that we're actually still completing the necessary steps to provide meaningful language access?" And so also... Again, it really just goes into taking the time to keep digging into why we're dedicating ourselves to language access, why we are trying to learn how we are evaluating our processes and also our policies and procedures, so that we can continue to have a floor to ceiling approach.

13:50 JS: Thank you for explaining all of that. I know being a part of it myself, that it's been a journey and we've learned a lot along the way, as you described, and so because of that, I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about the barriers that we faced while starting this language access plan and trying to implement it. So Damary, are you able to talk with us about that? 

14:14 DR: Absolutely. So one of the things that... One of the challenges we had was, Tatiana had mentioned that we should have everyone... A person from each department, on the Core Core Group. We weren't actually able to accomplish that, unfortunately, with our language access plan. We got a few people from across departments, but not... We didn't hit our target. But we made sure to invite them to our meetings when it made sense, if we really needed input. Sometimes with fiscal stuff... So we'll talk a little bit more about the financial stuff later, 'cause that's a big barrier to language access, is always the money. Another barrier that we faced was vital documents. Like, How do we determine what a vital document is? I think that when you're a direct service provider or a victim service provider, I think it's pretty easy to determine what your vital documents are. So it would be like an intake form, for example, or maybe your general services brochure. But because we're not quite a direct service provider, I think we struggled to figure out what our vital documents... What would we consider our vital documents.

15:32 DR: And then lastly, what languages to prioritize, because I think we want to provide language access to as many people as possible, but that's not always possible. So partly because of funding, but also how do you determine what languages... Like I said, What languages do we prioritize? I think Spanish is often one that comes up a lot. But then after that, that can vary because we're serving the entire state, we're not just serving one community or another. So eventually we landed on whatever... If 5% of the population speaks a particular language, we would prioritize getting things translated into that language, and then from there, whatever amounts are sort of closest to that, we would prioritize those. And I think we eventually also decided that the top three to five languages would be the ones that we select to translate materials into. And also if we get requests for translation, we always accommodate whatever requests come in.

16:41 KG: Can I just chime in on that? For one quick second. And like D said, we sort of thought about how do we identify which languages we should prioritize, and I just wanna say that what's been really interesting to me, and I think maybe... Well, I won't say all of us, but I think it's definitely been interesting or interesting to some of us, is that as we've dug more into language access, what we've found out is that the data that we have is only as good as the way it was collected. So to determine the languages spoken throughout our states or counties or communities, we're very often relying upon census data. And what I came to learn and didn't realize was that the census doesn't take into account people that may be deaf or hard of hearing, and so it really focuses on those spoken languages. So again, even the information that we have to go on is not inclusive, is not comprehensive. And so I just wanna really highlight that as Tatiana was saying earlier, this is a learning experience, these documents that we're creating, we really think of them as living, breathing things that we're constantly revisiting and thinking through, because if we waited until we were perfect, we wouldn't do anything.

18:00 KG: And so for me, that's been a big lesson, is to just... You can only work with what you know and as you learn, you continue to get better and better. And I just really have been grateful to so many of my coworkers who have really pushed this work forward and just said, "You know, we can't wait on this, we just have to really dive in and learn from our mistakes and keep growing." But again, we have to think about what information do we have and what information might we still need to find and what information might be imperfect, but that we still need to work with.

18:35 JS: That's making me think what Tatiana said earlier about that floor to ceiling approach and really trying to make sure that we were able to provide the most basic services in other languages, that we were making those accommodations, but that we could also dream big and think about, "Oh, what would it look like to have our newsletter go out in five different languages?" And right now, we might not have the capacity to make that happen, but we have this wish list of all the things that we hope we can one day do. But we wanna start with the things that we absolutely need to do to make sure that we're reaching as many folks as possible. So I know that's one thing I learned, but I'm wondering about some other lessons that we might have learned throughout this process.

19:24 DR: So there's a few of those, the first being buy-in. It is super important that you have buy-in from folks in your organization across levels. Not just folks at the top, but across departments, across maybe your leadership, but also your management team, department supervisors, because once you have a plan in place, those are the people... Your supervisors or your department directors are gonna be the ones that help you carry out that plan. So if they're not in it and they're not buying in, it's gonna be really hard to get that implemented across your organization. Another thing that we've learned is that proactive planning is really, really, really important. That you're doing stuff on the front end rather than as an afterthought. To elaborate, you wanna budget for stuff. I've kinda talked about this earlier, briefly, that funding is always a big barrier to providing services, and particularly language access. You wanna make sure that when you're doing your budget for the year that you have a line item around translation or interpretation, or maybe even captioning. Especially as we move towards a more virtual workspace, captioning becomes increasingly important for deaf and hard of hearing individuals. So you wanna think about that, what line items are in your budgets to make sure that you can cover those costs throughout the year.

20:57 DR: In addition to that, readjusting your thinking about what you're accomplishing. So when it comes to having trainings or services or things that are in other languages, are available in languages other than English, it means that for us that we may offer fewer trainings, but they'll be more accessible. So we're focusing on quality over quantity. In a way people are like, "Well, you're reaching less people if you have fewer trainings." Not necessarily, you actually might be reaching more people because now you have a training that's accessible in more languages than just English. So sometimes it's just reframing and thinking about, "Oh, we're actually not reaching less people, we're actually probably reaching the equivalent amount of people." Yeah, I think those are some of the things that we learned.

21:48 KG: And I would say also D, I think one of the huge things that we learned is that we should really be taking leadership from those who are not monolingual speakers and taking leadership from multilingual speakers because they are the ones that should be influencing, they are the ones that have the knowledge. And myself as a monolingual speaker, needing to take a step back because I don't hold the answers for a community that I'm not a part of, but I can show up and support and be a voice when their voice isn't being heard. And I think that's a huge lesson that we've learned in this process, and continuing to learn in this process is, it's okay not to have all the answers, but it's also very important to get your answers from those that have them and that live and walk the life.

22:48 DR: I think that is a really great point. Folks that are multilingual or bilingual, have sometimes that life experience, I think to add to that is also, yes, take leadership from folks who are bilingual, multilingual, but be very careful about tokenizing those folks. I always say it's great to have bilingual staff at your organization, but make sure that you're compensating them properly, that you are not putting more on their role than is feasible. So someone may be able to provide services in, say, Spanish, but they may not necessarily... They shouldn't necessarily be translating, for example, or interpreting. Those are separate roles. So we wouldn't ask somebody who wasn't an advocate to be an advocate and provide services in that way, you shouldn't be asking folks who are multilingual or bilingual to be acting outside of their job roles. For example, I'm bilingual myself, but I shouldn't be asked to, say, translate something unless that is specifically written within my job description and being compensated for it.

24:10 JS: That's such an important lesson, and I know that we've had to struggle with that in the past, and it's definitely an issue that still comes up at centers, and so I really appreciate you bringing that up as a really important lesson that we've learned. It can be easier to do it that way, but it doesn't mean that it's the right way to do it. So as we learn more things, we change our practices, and I think with language access, that's the perfect example of how we've had to kind of overthink and overhaul all of the different ways that we do things to make sure that we're meeting folks' needs. So the last question that I have, and this is for everyone. What resources would you recommend to an organization or a rape crisis center who's just getting started on their language access plan? 

25:00 TP: Well, I would say just to go along with developing the language access plan, if you don't have one, it's important to have those conversations, have those meetings, to just develop a language access plan. So I would suggest the limited English proficiency toolkit by Casa de Esperanza. That is the toolkit that PCAR use, the template that PCAR used, in developing language access plan. And so we also will be sharing our PCAR's language access plan in the future, and so if you're wanting to use both of those things together, it might be helpful to start there.

25:52 DR: I also wanted too say to that, in addition to the LEP toolkit from Casa Esperanza. Casa Esperanza themselves offers training and technical assistance on language access, as they've provided to us, that's available to victim services providers. They get funded to do that work. So if you are looking for assistance around language access, you can always reach out to PCAR, but also Casa Esperanza as well. PCAR's webinar series is also another resource that I would recommend. There are two of them, the first being an abbreviated version of the regional trainings that Karen and I did last year. It goes over a few things, including language access requirements for centers, so some of the things we've discussed at the beginning, like what the law requires of providers and also how to use our language access services that are free to rape crisis centers. And it also goes over how to access some of the resources that we created that are on the online community.

27:29 KG: I could just say, I think the most important thing to me in doing this language access work has been the notion of doing this as a team. What we highlighted earlier in that recommendation from Casa de Esperanza for us to create that team because again, we're also learning and when we're working together, we can be holding each other accountable, helping each other think in new and different ways. And so I would really recommend, again, that folks not look at this as one person's job, this really is something that should be part of every person's job description, and also to make sure that people are really supporting each other in doing the work.

28:09 JS: This has been so great. I wanna say thank you to all of you for joining us to talk about language access and what it's looked like at PCAR, so hopefully other folks can learn and follow along with our process as we go about. So we'll make sure to link to all kinds of resources in the description of the episode, including the ones we mentioned today and then a few others that we have found helpful. So that's all the time that we have today. I wanna say thank you again to all of you for joining us.

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28:48 JS: If you or a loved one needs help, a local Sexual Assault Center is available, 24/7. Call 1888-772-7227 for more information, or find your local center online at pcar.org. Together, we can end sexual violence. Any views or opinions expressed on PA Centered by staff or their guests are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of PCAR or PCAR's funders.