Initially funded with a grant from the Oregon Community Foundation and a Benton County ARPA grant, the Comité de Lideres is a leadership program aimed at developing capacity in the Latinx community to identify issues of concern and develop action plans to address those issues. The first cohort (2022-2023) had seven participants and met 15 times, in sessions of one hour and a half, to identify issues of concern in their communities, prioritize them, imagine ways of addressing those issues, plan projects using logic models, and present the resulting projects to stakeholders. They developed a program to address environmental education through storytelling, connecting children and youth to the history of their parents and grandparents, many of them immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and other Latin American countries.
