Quietly growing: Outreach program assists area Hispanics
By Barbara Fitzgerald
When the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran an article last December on the University's Hispanic Outreach Program and on Dulce Lawrence, the program's director, a number of people at the University were surprised to learn that such a program existed here. Not so in the local Hispanic community, which seems well aware of Richmond's involvement.
"We get things done," says Lawrence. "We're serving in all kinds of places and in many ways. We get a lot of goodwill."
The outreach program has been quietly growing and thriving since its beginnings in 1999, thanks to the enthusiastic leadership of Lawrence, a native of Cuba who arrived in Miami in September 1962, exactly a month before the Cuban missile crisis-an unforeseen occurrence which resulted in an eight-year separation from her family back in Cuba. In 1964 Lawrence left Florida and came to Virginia to "broaden my horizons." Part of that broadening process involved an eventual enrollment at Richmond, where she received a bachelor's degree in 1969 and a master's degree in 1976.
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Dulce Lawrence (c.) meets with Adranae Mena (l.), member services director of the Manchester YMCA, and Tanya Gonzalez, manager of the City of Richmond Hispanic Liaison Office, at a gathering of the newly formed Hispanic Rotary Club.
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In 1978 Lawrence held a temporary appointment to teach a Spanish class on campus, covering for a professor who had gone on sabbatical. But, her real teaching career at the University began in 1991. Spanish professor Laila Dawson, now retired, had received a grant to begin intensive Spanish classes and enlisted Lawrence's assistance. Lawrence still teaches intermediate Spanish in that program, in addition to her Spanish in the Community course, the latter being the wellspring for the Hispanic outreach efforts of the Latin and Iberian Studies Program.
As director of Outreach, Lawrence coordinates the volunteer assignments of students who provide a number of services to the area Hispanic community, including translating for patients and doctors at local free medical clinics; visiting the homes of Hispanics to help answer questions and solve problems; and working with the local efforts of the International Hospital for Children, an organization that treats, among others, children from Honduras, Guatemala and the Dominion Republic.
Volunteers mentor at elementary and middle schools, translate for parent-teacher conferences, work with the after-school program at the YMCA, or just generally help out as needed in response to calls from various schools and Hispanic-related organizations. Whatever the volunteers tackle, they work toward helping Hispanics assimilate into their new communities while retaining their own cultures. Many of the connections and relationships become longstanding ones.
"We're still working with the very first school we ever made contact with," says Lawrence, "and many others that we've added since. With the Spanish population growing so rapidly in this country, we don't have enough students to meet all the needs."
University volunteers are mostly students in the Spanish in the Community class or the one-credit Service in the Community class-though some others volunteer in order to fulfill requirements in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies or the Bonner Scholars program. Some just sign on out of a volunteering spirit.
"This type of community volunteerism is getting more widespread," Lawrence observes. "It begins now in a lot of high schools, and Richmond is one of the colleges that really promotes it."
Lawrence is proud that a number of the students who have participated in the outreach program continue their volunteer service long after their Spanish classes end. "I know of some who have gone abroad in summers, maybe with their churches, to continue their work. Some end up teaching, like one who is teaching Spanish now in Chesterfield County. The director of volunteers with the International Hospital for Children was one of our student volunteers," Lawrence says of Lauren Corbett, '04, who can now make good use of the outreach program and its volunteers for her own organization.
"Ours is a well-organized, well-structured program," says Claudia Ferman, Latin American and Iberian Studies chair. "Outreach is an excellent opportunity for us to project to the community what Richmond does, what it is. This program is the touch of the University that can be felt in the community, and it gives us a chance to explore and promote the culture that stands behind the language as well."
Lawrence continues to find ways to expand the program. She is currently organizing a plan to place Richmond students in elementary classrooms to assist community volunteers in reading in Spanish to the kids. "Lots of these youngsters have a difficult time reading in English at just the time when you're trying to develop their love of reading," says Lawrence, pointing out that their parents often don't have time to spare or don't have books on hand.
"That's a gap that Richmond students can fill," she says. Lawrence also is supporting a newly formed Hispanic Rotary Club in the area. "My father was president of the Rotary Club in Cuba," she says, "so I have a particular interest in this project."
Lawrence's husband, whom she met while both attended a college in Tidewater, is supportive of her long hours and hard work in the community. But while their daughter speaks Spanish very well, her husband struggles with it a bit. "I enrolled him in a summer immersion program in Spanish at Richmond," Lawrence laughs, "but when I checked with his professor after a while, she said he had left class and never come back.
"'There were too many irregular verbs at once,' he told me."
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