Emergency interpreters needed

https://justicewomen.com/news/sites/...1217589023.png

Are You Bilingual? You Are Needed Now!

Are you in Sonoma, Mendocino, or Napa County? Are you bilingual?

Anywhere in the U.S.? You are needed Now!

Please link this notice to others on your social media:
https://justicewomen.com/news/are-you-bilingual-you-are-needed-now

Help and information in this conflagration are difficult enough to navigate in English. In Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino counties more than one out of five people are limited English speaking. Their need to access emergency services of all kinds is just as urgent, and in many cases more urgent, than for English speakers. The need for your help is enormous.

If you're bilingual in Spanish, Tigrinya, Tagalog, Chinese, Korean, in fact, in any language, your dual language skills are invaluable. You are needed right now and will be needed for many months to come. Our counties have over 40 spoken languages. In many ways the smaller language population groups are more in need of help than the larger language groups.

If you're outside the fire area, anywhere in the U.S., you can help too, especially if you're willing to familiarize yourself with our emergency services. Text translations are also urgently needed.
You will make a world of difference for families in need. You can do this work from your home, with a phone and a laptop.

Requirements:

• You should be sufficiently bilingual to be able to communicate sensitively with traumatized individuals and be able to work through bureaucratic tangles in both languages.
• You should have regular times of availability.
• Be willing to make phone calls, gather needed information, to interpret (oral) and/or translate (text), care and nurture.
• Ideal would be if you could connect with one family and work with them through to recovery. It may be that some people will need only spot help, say with filling out a form or getting a question or two answered, others may need more extensive help navigating multiple systems
• Be willing to volunteer your valuable services to fire victims for no pay.

How to Connect:
Early on it's going to be next to impossible to connect and coordinate to offer your services to official emergency services such as police or red cross, though, of course, you can try if you wish. Here are some examples of places where it's likely to be easier to connect and coordinate. You can probably think of many more.

• Call or email area churches, child care centers, food banks, pharmacies, schools, clinics, shelters, women's centers, animal welfare, non profits, and other institutions that are likely to be overwhelmed with non English speakers.
• Call or email area bilingual media, such as KBBF or La Voz. These media are already stretched to the limit trying to broadcast emergency information. At the same time fire victims are calling them for help. Offer your services.
• Keep trying. Organizations are so over-stressed they often aren't answering phones or even returning calls. So keep trying. You're needed.

More info here

https://justicewomen.com/news/sites/...1217589023.png

Because of your help spreading the word, we've now got a bank of volunteer interpreters/translators offering their skills to help non English-speaking persons victims of the northern California fires. And we've got a gem of a big-data web guy building us the necessary input forms, archiving, and search tools for pairing the help with those in need of help, when they need it, according to what they need, for the duration of the long complex road to recovery.

The reason I'm coming back to you now, of course, is because you've proven yourselves to be the right people for the job.

So if you would help again please, copy and paste on your social media...... what we most urgently need now to round out the team and scale up the project is a few good people with administrative skills.

They don't have to be bilingual as they will mostly be matching data and then communicating with the interpreters/translators who will then be communicating with the clients with whom they've been paired. They can work from home. They can choose their hours. They can be anywhere.

Admin Angel Requirements:

• Must communicate well by phone in English,
  
• Must be accurate and adept at data input and retrieval,
  
• Must be willing to volunteer and care about serving families traumatized by catastrophe,
  
• Must abide by the strictest codes of confidentiality
  
• Email Marie: [email protected]

For more info on the project and updates go to https://www.justicewomen.com and scroll down the page.