UCSB linguists Eric W. Campbell and Guillem Belmar and community interpreters Salustia Ávila, Javier García, Abigail Hernández, José Luis Mendoza, Jeremías Salazar, and Nayra Pacheco Guzmán have been awarded a $10,000 grant from the Fund for Santa Barbara for their project Justicia Social de Intérpretes de Lenguas Originarias (JSILO). JSILO’s mission is to address the severe inequities in language access faced by Indigenous community members originally from southern Mexico (Indígena) who reside in Santa Barbara County. With the impactful funding from this grant, the team will carry out a series of workshops in Santa Maria, led by experienced interpreters to: 1) build capacity among developing Indígena interpreters, 2) investigate Indígena views on health, and 3) create multilingual glossaries of specialized terminology in a range of Mixtec (and possibly other Indígena language) varieties. The materials resulting from these workshops will be disseminated to Indígena and community health service/provider/advocacy audiences in printed pamphlets and on the JSILO web page. We gratefully acknowledge this important support from the Fund for Santa Barbara as well as administrative assistance for our efforts from the UCSB Office of Development and ISBER.

JSILO, alongside other grantees, was formally recognized Wednesday, June 15, at the Fund for Santa Barbara's Spring 2023 Award Grants Ceremony in the Lobero Courtyard in Downtown Santa Barbara. Our sincerest thanks again to the Fund for Santa Barbara.

If you would like more information on this work, please reach out to us at justicia.jsilo@gmail.com