Bilingual Campaigns for Immigrant Services

Immigrant services nonprofits cannot afford translation-step bilingual. The communities you serve are the most attuned audience in the country to which organizations actually communicate with them, and which ones perform bilingual without doing the work.

The challenge

Immigrant services orgs serve communities whose trust is hard-won. Spanish copy that reads as a translation — generic vocabulary, missing cultural references, the wrong register for the audience's country of origin — quietly erodes that trust over time. So does English-only crisis comms during a moment when the Spanish-speaking part of the audience needed information first.

The fix is structural: bilingual at the brief stage, with attention to which Spanish (Mexican, Caribbean, Andean, Southern Cone) matches the audience.

What I deliver

• Bilingual member, family, and community communications. Built in both languages from day one with cultural register matched to the audience.
• Spanish-language media relations on immigrant rights, family separation, citizenship, and DACA stories.
• Bilingual crisis playbooks for ICE enforcement events, policy changes, and rapid-response advocacy.
• Bilingual fundraising and donor communications. Spanish-speaking donors are a real and underserved audience.

Where the work connects to my career

I currently lead marketing and communications at School in the Square, a PreK–12 dual-language English/Spanish public charter network in Washington Heights and Inwood — neighborhoods where immigrant services work happens every day. The family communications discipline transfers directly: bilingual at the brief stage, cultural fluency in both languages, audience-specific story selection.

"The communities you serve are the most attuned audience in the country to which organizations actually communicate with them, and which ones perform bilingual without doing the work."