Description
EDUCA and CENTRO LATINO are leading the Bilingual Latina Women’s Creative Voices Project, Crónicas, sponsored by a grant from the Kentucky Women Foundation. This program will enable women to tell their stories as immigrants who have journeyed from their country to the United States in order to better their lives. Through the use of seminars, forums, and discussions, they will learn to write effectively about their experiences and feelings with their struggles and hardships dealing with domestic violence, alcohol and drug abuse, and parenting hardships. We see their courage in leaving their homes in foreign countries and making the exhausting trek toward a life never possible in their homes as a very positive condition for change and growth. We propose to use the literary form of creative writing to enable Latina women to share their stories, use their voices to promote change in their communities, and allow them to shine as the independent people they are. As they share their stories, the influence for good will also release gifts in those who hear and see this transformation. We expect this to be a catalyst for their discovery of their own talents, beauty, independence, courage, and even more virtues that are within them. Latinos are the fasting growing minority and it’s important to give women a chance to rise up from their circumstance and find pride in their past as well as encourage a new hope for their futures.
Crónicas: Bilingual Latina Women’s Creative Voices Project is organized by Arcea Zapata de Aston, Ph.D. from EDUCA and founder of the program and Sister Fran Wilhelm from Centro Latino.
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The artist or arts organization telling this story was supported in part by a grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. KFW is based on the belief that when women and girls advance, so does Kentucky. For more information about the foundation and the social change artmaking being done by the individuals and organizations it supports, visit www.kfw.org."