Strengthening Milwaukee’s Hispanic community & economy The Hispanic Collaborative launched in January with a focus on growing employment, entrepreneurship and civic engagement among members of the Milwaukee Region’s Hispanic community. Nancy Hernandez, president and founder of Milwaukee-based Abrazo Marketing, is serving as president of the the initiative. She sat down for a Q and A with Milwaukee Commerce.
Milwaukee Commerce: How would you describe the Hispanic Collaborative?
we’re tied at the hip. without creating level footing for Milwaukee’s Hispanic community, our region endangers its future economic prosperity.
Nancy Hernandez:
The Hispanic Collaborative is an initiative that is aimed at moving Hispanic Milwaukee into the top-10 in the Hispanic well-being index. That involves variables of education, income, overall health and other aspects. The index was commissioned here by the Hispanic community through funding from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation to understand how greater Milwaukee compares to other Hispanic communities — and where, really, were areas for improvement? That was done by the UW-Milwaukee Center for Urban Studies. We are 39th on the overall list of 50. There’s a lot of room to move up.
Nancy Hernandez
MC: What are your overall goals for the Hispanic Collaborative?
NH:
We’re really approaching this with an outcomes perspective in mind. Rather than guess on where our areas of focus should be, we went back to the
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researchers and asked them to look at this mathematically. Where can we get the most bang for our buck? Our first areas of focus is creating upward mobility. We have high levels of the population working, but are still stuck in the cycle of poverty. We need to move folks from $10-12 per hour jobs, upskilling them so they’re able to be at $20, $25 an hour jobs. The second focus is entrepreneurism. Milwaukee is at the very bottom of that list in the 50-metro comparison. Hispanics nationally are still the top demographic for starting new businesses – one and a half times more likely than any other demo. Hispanics here in Milwaukee are not materialistically different than Hispanics anywhere else. That’s a nut that we need to crack. It’s good for jobs, income, wages and tax base — but it also would add leadership to our community. The third focus is civic participation. Voter turnout, which the Hispanic community does very poorly here, is one of those correlating variables.
MC: You announced this effort in January. What’s been happening since then?
