By LAJFellow Daniela Pérez ‘17,18

(Learn more about becoming a LAJFellow here.)

As the summer starts, the linguistic inclusivity project comes to an end. It's bittersweet to see the project get concluded. However, I believe and hope that this project is the first of many actions taken towards more inclusivity inside of LAJF and CRS. 

What happened during the first half of the project?

In case you didn't read the last blog or you need a little refresher on what this project was about, here is a short summary of what the first months of this project looked like. Since my main goal with this project was to help members of our community that come from a non-English speaking background, the first few months were used to analyze how we could make camp more inclusive and organize these ideas. 

Once we decided what languages and what documents we wanted to focus on, the next step was to call out for volunteers. The response the project received was amazing and higher than expected. This allowed us to expand the project to languages that we didn't think we could. 

The languages we ended up translating to are: Dutch, French, Greek, Hungarian, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Somali, Spanish and Vietnamese. The main focus was on translating a website summary that included the most relevant information for parents, guardians, schools or just any person interested in CRS that did not come from an English speaking background. However, thanks to our amazing community we were also able to expand the project and get some testimonials in different languages and subtitles for a short video that explains camp. 

The first part of the project ended with emails being sent to all the volunteer and a lot of hope for everything to work out.

Where is the project now? 

As mentioned in the beginning, the project is coming to an end. It was amazing to see everything fall into place after those emails were sent. 

If you head to the LAJF website you will find a new section that includes all the work we did for months. Some languages have two buttons, one that includes the website summary and one that includes the testimonial. Other languages only have the website summary. This is due to the number of volunteers we had for each language and it shows that this project can still grow and be expanded to many other languages and pieces of information. Still, I am very proud of what we achieved in this short time.

Also, you can head to the following link (link) and find a short video that explains CRS, if you click the option for subtitles you will see that new languages have been added.

I hope you like the results!

A little reflection

Needless to say, the past few months have been a period of reflection and hard work. I learned so much about myself while doing this project. First of all, I realized how many time management skills I had (believe me, balancing work and university is not easy at all). Second, I developed many skills that will be very useful in the future and that have made me a rounder person. 

I will love to take this opportunity to thank the amazing team at LAJF that I had the pleasure of working with. Thank you for being so patient with me, trusting me and allowing me to grow. To anyone that is doubting about whether they should apply to the fellowship program, do it. There is no better environment to start gaining experience and skills. 

It is important to notice that none of this could have been possible without the help of our amazing community. This project was mainly based on the help of volunteers. From the start, it was amazing to see how many people wanted to help. I designed a work plan based on how much time people could put into the project and what languages they spoke. I sent emails to every person with instructions about how to do their part and a due date. I was very nervous after this because I wasn't sure if people were actually going to send anything or get back to me. However, when the due date came I was so happy to see the amount of documents we had received. 

There were some languages that I did not receive any volunteers for, like Somali and Vietnamese. For these languages I looked for freelancers that wanted to help. It was amazing to see people outside of the community interested in the work that LAJF does. 

Working on this project has been one of the highlights of my young adult life. I feel a lot more prepared to take on any jobs or responsibilities that come in the future. I am just thankful to have worked with LAJF and CRS and put a little piece of myself to make it better. I will always come back to this amazing community and it's been amazing to feel welcomed and work with it.

Special thanks to our amazing volunteers:

• Kevin Chung

• Nicole Liranzo

• Paula Porras

• Andre Pires

• Rania Oumbarek

• Jacob Bromberg

• Theodoros Tsipos

• Machi Dadouli

• Bálint Hederics

• Hedvig Atanaszov

• Ian Christensen 

• Evan da Silva

• Steven Yuniver

• Louk de la Rive Box

• Madina Abduvohitova