Transnational Partnership Benefits Catholic Charities Programs Serving Mexican Families in Chicago

This summer, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago marks its third year as a partner in a transnational student exchange that has expanded the agency’s outreach to Mexican migrants in the Chicago area. Catholic Charities provides volunteer work and field placements for Mexican college students as part of a collaboration between two Jesuit universities, Loyola University in Chicago, and Iberoamericana University in Mexico City.

The Iberoamericana students attend a seminar in migrant studies at Loyola. Catholic Charities places the students in supervised volunteer and field work activities at its sites serving Chicago’s Mexican community. The placements are designed to fulfill the social service requirement for bachelor’s degree programs in Mexico, as well as provide work experiences related to the students’ major fields of study.

Catholic Charities puts the students to work in a wide range of sites, from food pantries to counseling programs to administrative departments, like Communications. A cadre of nutrition students has assisted the agency’s Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program by translating program materials into Spanish, and providing nutrition education. For example, the students conducted food taste tests to introduce Spanish-speaking families to new uses for foods such as brown rice and lower-fat milk, which will be part of a revamped WIC food package later this year. In Communications, the students translated material for brochures and the agency’s website, and wrote stories for agency publications about the experiences of Mexican migrants in Chicago. Students from all disciplines regularly help out at the Casa Catalina food pantry, and work with children in an afterschool program that serves a primarily Mexican population.

"This project is changing our culturally-sensitive system of care for the better,” says Kathy Donahue, Director of Programs at Catholic Charities. “Mexican families are quite comfortable speaking with a college-educated person from their own country. Our respective institutions are redesigning materials to be more relevant to what Mexican families are struggling with, both from the receiving and sending nations. We are training leaders for the future to solve problems on a global level with greater empathy and understanding. Transnational projects enrich all of us.”

This summer, Iberoamericana students are testing new workshop modules for a transnational family strengthening curriculum at Catholic Charities, while their counterparts, college students from the U.S., test the modules in Mexico. Created by the Mexican federal human service agency, Sistema Nacional para Desarrollo Integral de la Familia (SNDIF), the curriculum is offered to Mexican immigrants living in Chicago through community-based workshops, with the goal of strengthening family values, knowledge and skills. The new workshop modules address the areas of nutrition, economic literacy and education support.

The transnational curriculum pilot program is the result of a year-long planning and development process for a project, “Supporting Families in an Era of Globalization: Aligning Social Worker Education and Human Service Systems with Contemporary Transnational Population Trends,” funded by a grant from the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) that was awarded jointly to Catholic Charities and Loyola University. The grant has allowed staff from Catholic Charities, students and faculty from Loyola and Iberoamericana, and other partners to review the SNDIF curriculum and develop and pilot the new modules, with the goal of strengthening family support programs between different countries and their social service systems.