Overview
For almost a quarter of a century, UNO has worked through churches, schools, small businesses, block clubs and other community locales to meet and work with everyday people on a one-on-one basis. This effort has not only kept us grounded in the vision and interests at the neighborhood level, but has created a great number of relationships with emerging community leaders whose input and efforts have guided the organization since its inception.
Though UNO is a home-grown presence in local neighborhoods – both steeped in and comprised of the community it is working to impact – we’ve evolved over our 24 years in both our organizational structure and in our approach to community organizing.
What has remained constant, however, is UNO’s vision for our community, one where Hispanics emerge as the new middle class, employing the same determination that drove them to this country to make the right choices for their families.
UNO’s commitment to that vision has led to a track record of success, and in the process, has challenged the status quo within public institutions and public leadership toward making positive community changes.
Early Organizing
UNO challenged community residents to become engaged in their local communities and organize themselves around issues of local import. We were a constant presence in local churches, schools, and block clubs, working through “one-on-one’s” and group leadership training sessions to identify and coach new leaders at the grassroots.
We challenged people to grapple with the concepts that the father of community organizing, Saul Alinsky, identified as central to change, those of self-interest, power, relationships, and the public arena, among others.
In the early 1980s, UNO began to build up its community base and forged itself into the core of local neighborhoods. Simultaneously, individuals trained through the leadership sessions began to emerge throughout the city as new voices and agents of change for their community.
School Reform and Local School Councils
What would ultimately put UNO ‘on the map’ was its involvement in Chicago’s School Reform movement of the late 1980’s. This movement would become one of the most radical and innovative public school transformations in United States’ history.
UNO effectively stepped onto this civic and political stage as an emerging player, working through its growing community infrastructure to organize thousands of Hispanic parents under the banner of school reform.
UNO’s key role in mobilizing parents in this citywide effort, positioned the organization to have a seat at the table, drafting viable reform legislation that changed the political landscape for Chicago’s public schools.
Our actions helped create a tipping point that pushed the creation of Local School Councils (LSCs). LSCs are a publicly elected body made up of parents, teachers, and community residents installed at each public school unit in Chicago, and have such powers as hiring and firing principals as well as making budgetary decisions – truly an unprecedented empowerment of a community.
UNO’s organizing efforts extended into a campaign to enroll Hispanics as candidates and voters for the newly created LSC positions, becoming the largest voting bloc in the first year of LSC elections.
U.S. Citizenship
Our successful campaign to radically change the face of public education became the model of effective organizing for UNO. What followed was organizing for naturalizing tens of thousands of legal permanent residents so they could become American Citizens.
This became the means to voter empowerment and civic engagement for a community long disenfranchised by their legal status. Through its citizenship campaign, which started in 1992, UNO conducted awareness activities and held hundreds of registration events at churches and schools within Hispanic neighborhoods across Chicago.
Our efforts made over 80,000 immigrants into naturalized American citizens, culminating in what became the nation’s most successful naturalization campaign.
This further enhanced UNO’s standing within its community and bolstered its reputation as a city-wide power player seeking to improve the lot of Chicago’s burgeoning Latino community.
Thus the fledgling power organization that had – only a decade earlier – begun organizing at the grass-roots level, was poised to demand excellence in its public institutions and execute where others fell short in the delivery of public services.
Educational Outreach
UNO’s parent involvement programs evolved from its work in Chicago’s School Reform efforts and ran simultaneously with UNO’s naturalization campaign, engaging thousands of parents from 40 partner schools.
Parent involvement ranged from attending school-based workshops on education within the home, to shaping educational public policy, to learning about issues of family health.
Our publicly-funded parent support programs such as Take 10! Minutes with Your Child in the early 1990s and, later, Leer Para Lograr (Read to Achieve) emerged as a cornerstone of UNO’s philosophy of quality education.
UNO’s prominent position as Chicago’s premier Latino organization afforded it respect (and funding) from key institutions, including the Chicago Public Schools.
It was UNO’s preeminent status as a school reform pioneer and advocate for Latino families that led us to seek and be awarded one of Chicago’s first charter schools in 1998.
UNO Charter Schools
With the power and experience to enact widespread change, we opened our first charter school, then located at two sites in Greater Tri-Taylor and Little Village, in 1998.
UNO believed then, as it still does, that the charter school is the “vehicle” within the community that drives dreams of opportunities and success, and makes them come true for the children of local families and generations to come.
Originally managed and operated by the Educational Management Organization (EMO), Advantage Schools, the K-8 school – Octavio Paz Charter School – was failing until UNO assumed full responsibility and took over day-to-day operations in 2000.
By 2003, the school had reversed its decline in test scores and now boasts some of the highest test scores among the city’s charter schools. UNO’s original Chicago charter was renewed through June 30, 2008 by the Chicago Board of Education.
Currently, UNO operates five K-8 schools at six campuses across Chicago offering free, quality public education to predominately Hispanic students. In 2007, UNO opened its first charter school outside of Chicago in New Orleans to meet the demands of a rapidly increasing Hispanic population.
By fall 2008, UNO will have opened its 10th campus, including its first high school and will serve over 3,500 children in Chicago and New Orleans.
Metropolitan Leadership Institute
Based on the idea that Hispanics must become more widely involved and influential in public life, UNO launched its Metropolitan Leadership Institute (MLI) in 2001 to prepare our community to create and seize public leadership roles in corporate, civic and political spheres.
The MLI aims to create lasting institutions from within the community that will continually cultivate new public leaders. We feel civic leadership must become an integral part of the Hispanic community’s system of values and the new leaders MLI generates are tasked with forging strong networks of public relationships that will anchor the Hispanic community in the United States and augment its success for generations to come.
So far, six classes have graduated from our program, each instilled with the themes central to UNO’s history and our legacy as a community organization: promoting civic action, inspiring new leaders, and provoking sound public dialogue.
With each new class, the MLI reaffirms what we already knew about our communities: that there is still a great deal of untapped talent in our neighborhoods.