Santa Barbara County’s Promotores Network will grow in the near future thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Women’s Fund of Santa Barbara.
The Promotores is a group of volunteers throughout Santa Barbara County who engage Spanish-speaking community members and bridge the gap to help them access resources. The organization operates as part of Children and Family Resource Services, a nonprofit under the Santa Barbara County Education Office.
“The Promotores has been around since 2002,” Santa Barbara County Education Office Director of Communications Valerie Cantella said. “Three women who were working in the Health Program Center at [Santa Barbara] Neighborhood Clinics decided that they were going to help do some clinic outreach because there’s so many health-related issues that tend to affect specific populations, and in this case, Spanish-speaking populations. They built from there, and it has become this robust community resource.”
The Promotores has now grown to more than 200 members countywide, and with the recent Women’s Fund grant, will soon be able to add 24 new volunteers to the network. Josefa Rios was one of the founders, and today she serves as the lead promotora.
“Our main focus is just to address and connect members in the community [who] lack resources or have trouble accessing assistance,” Rios said. “It could be from education, to health advocacy—just make their lives better for themselves and their families.”
Rios said the $100,000 grant is one of the largest that the Promotores Network has ever received. The funds will be used to train and certify 24 new promotores as family health navigators.
“[They will] focus on health care and prevention with any disparities regarding mental health issues we might have in our community,” Rios said. “The promotores will be the navigators to connect our members in the community to the resources.”
Cantella said each member of the Promotores Network typically makes contact with 100 community members each year, so the addition of 24 promotores will lead to about 2,400 additional connections.
“The benefit of that is, once you have a relationship with a promotora, you then have another trusted leader to go back and ask for other support,” Cantella said. “Right now, they’re doing a lot of work with vaccine acceptance and trying to educate people and answer questions and help them to connect to vaccine appointments.”
Cantella said the promotores helped tremendously with the county’s census efforts.
“Calling people, setting up booths at different events back before COVID,” Cantella recalled. “Basically, because these are people that are in the Spanish-speaking community, they’re trusted resources for Spanish-speaking residents.”
Rios said the pandemic has been challenging to navigate as an organization, but the new funding will help.
“We’ve been working so hard,” Rios said. “It shows the wonderful work the promotores are doing out there. Their voices, their impact, and changing lives. … To be able to have this opportunity with the Women’s Fund, it’s big for us. It’s huge.”
This article appears in Jun 17-24, 2021.