Researchers at Camino are in the process of conducting a statewide survey on the strengths and needs of the state's Hispanic/Latino community. While results for the state and the Cape Fear Region are preliminary, there are public results available for Mecklenburg County and Western North Carolina.
Kelly Kenoyer: Lennin Caro is the lead researcher at Camino, a community resource center and health clinic in Charlotte that's been doing research on the Latino population for the past five years. Thank you so much for joining me.
Lennin Caro: Hey, thank you for having me.
KK: So, you've recently been working on this community needs assessment for the Latino population in the Cape Fear region and in the state overall. Can you tell me your broad findings in terms of some of the needs that this population has?
LC: Yeah. So broadly, the top needed services tend to be related to health care. So dental services tend to be number one across the board. Access to parental health services, wanting a doctor that speaks their language, most likely in Spanish, access to vision services. Those are the patterns we see across the state in terms of what the Hispanic community is wanting.
KK: One of the things that I noticed in your regional outlook for the southeast is that it's not just access to healthcare options, like being able to go to a clinic being able to afford it with health insurance. It's also the language barrier when it comes to accessing health care. So what is the issue when it comes to that language barrier?
LC: You know, health is such a sensitive topic, right? A lot of individuals, they feel more comfortable talking about their own health in a language they understand. And you know, the bureaucracy of the healthcare system itself is very complex, right? All the paperwork, all the understandings of policies and insurance and things like that. You know, a lot of that is not readily available in Spanish either. So that can create a lot of anxieties around engaging with the healthcare system, maybe to the point where, like, you know, it's not worth engaging with it.
KK: One of the other things that was interesting to me when I looked over this research is that so many of these folks are accessing resources, asking for help from faith leaders rather than going to local governments. So why is that the case? And how can government better serve this population?
LC: There's different I guess I'll call it hypotheses, if I want to sound nerdy. The first one is that in our sample, there's a lot of undocumented immigrants that took the survey, and there could be a fear or mistrust of engaging with governmental institutions. In the survey itself, just so you know, by faith sources, we mean anyone that selected that they go to a pastor, that they go to a church, or they go to their faith. I think we put God as an answer choice and to see what would happen. And a lot of people picked it.
So it kind of shows that people tend to rely on their faith, or rely on their, you know, communities of faith when they have that need. And you know, it could be the first choice, because maybe they don't feel welcomed by their local health department, or there's nobody that speaks Spanish, or they think that there's no one that speaks Spanish in their local health department, or whatever resource they're trying to engage with.
And you know, you can interpret this result in different ways. You know: does government need to do a better job in making immigrants, whether or not they're documented, no matter what their status, making them feel more welcomed so that they can engage with their resources? Or can you interpret these results in which you know, perhaps there's creative ways in which we can collaborate with communities of faith and nonprofit organizations to deliver services to this community of people, since they're going there first already.
KK: Why is it important to study the Latino population in the Cape Fear region and in the state of North Carolina?
LC: Yeah. So in North Carolina, you know, the Latino population's been growing a lot for the past 30 years. It's, it's grown exponentially. And in the southeast region, it's, it hasn't been as moving as other parts of North Carolina, like the Charlotte area or even the Durham, you know, triangle area, or the triad area over at Woodson Salem, but it's still emerging, right? It's still becoming more and more part of the local community, and because it's becoming a bigger part of the community, we have to, I believe have collective responsibility to make sure that they have access to the resources they need to live fulfilling lives, be able to raise their family, be able to take care of themselves, and if issues like language, access, discrimination, mistrust, if these are barriers that prevent this community from integrating more or being a bigger positive part of the local community, then that needs to be better understood. And you know what better way to do that than to ask people directly about what they think and what they need?
KK: Lennin Caro, the lead researcher at Camino, thank you so much for your time.
LC: Thank you so much for having me.
Camino expects to have statewide results and results for the Cape Fear Region by the end of 2024.
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