Identity Inc.
For Latino youths, finding a sense of purpose and belonging
By Julie Rasicot
Fifteen-year-old Anthony Cano was staying out late, hanging with the wrong crowd, getting into trouble. He didn’t trust anyone, he says, and he kept his feelings bottled up inside.
Then, friends at Gaithersburg High School suggested he get involved with an after-school program run by Identity, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide Latino youths with opportunities to reach their potential.
After that, “everything turned around,” Cano says. “Identity helps kids to speak out loud, to speak about personal stuff.”
Twice a week, the Gaithersburg teenager attends two-hour, after-school sessions to talk about setting and achieving goals. “There is a lot of discussion about being true to yourself, and there are exercises to think about your own identity,” says Monica Davalos, one of the nonprofit’s intensive case managers.
“Identity sees youth as assets that need to be nourished, not as problems that need to be fixed,” says Executive Director Diego Uriburu, 43. “You build from the positive.”
Uriburu and Candace Kattar, formerly executive director and now a senior adviser, founded Identity in Washington, D.C., in 1998 to help Latino youths transition into adulthood by providing skills, guidance, positive role models and a strong sense of community.
The organization moved to a pink clapboard house in Gaithersburg in 2003 to serve Montgomery County’s growing Latino community—Latinos now make up 17 percent of the county’s population, an increase of about 4.5 percent since 2000, according to U.S. Census figures—and it receives much of its funding from the county’s Department of Health and Human Services.
With an annual budget of roughly $3 million, Identity serves more than 1,000 Latino youths in the county, offering GED classes, workforce development, teen pregnancy prevention, free HIV testing and counseling and after-school programs in 11 public middle and high schools.
Identity also provides case management, connects families to social services and operates youth centers in Silver Spring, Takoma Park and Gaithersburg. Latinos can be “stoic,” Uriburu says, with family members unaccustomed to communicating, so Identity teaches them how to talk to each other and how to navigate the schools. The goal, Uriburu says, is for “Identity to be a home.”
The organization also works with youths who are in gangs, or at risk of joining, by providing mentoring and mental health counseling. In 2006, a needs assessment of 1,000 youths revealed that 50 percent were “going from bad to worse,” Uriburu says, with many involved in violence and lacking confidence about their futures. Latinos have the highest dropout rate among public school students, he adds.
Budget cuts in county social services and anti-immigrant sentiment have compounded the problems, Uriburu says. That’s why Identity is working with the county as part of the Latino Youth Collaborative to develop solutions to the most pressing needs.
If the county doesn’t get a handle on helping Latinos, a community that could “become a great asset will become a real challenge,” Uriburu says. “Somebody needs to build the levees now.”
