INNOVATORS Gold Award - New Orleans City Business

NONPROFIT
Puentes New Orleans/LatiNola
Key innovation: an organization geared toward building
a strong and unified Latino community
Biggest clients: the Latino population of greater New
Orleans
Where they’re based: New Orleans
Top executive: Lucas Diaz, founder and executive director
Year introduced: incorporated in April 2007
PHOTO BY FRANK AYMAMI
WHEN LUCAS DIAZ looks at New Orleans, he sees an
international city. But in addition to the very visible influences
hailing from French, Spanish, African, Caribbean,
Italian, Irish cultures and many in between, there is one
influential group he believes has been systemically overlooked
— Latinos.
Diaz is the founder and executive director of Puentes
New Orleans, a nonprofit geared toward integrating the
Latino population into city planning and the New Orleans
community.
Once that happens, Diaz said, New Orleans can then
call itself a truly international city.
“New Orleans has all the assets in place and the community
is welcoming that way,” Diaz said. “There’s always
going to be sections of the community that won’t work
together. … But I’m finding people who do want to work
together and I’m putting them together.”
Diaz, who immigrated at age 8 with his family from the
Dominican Republic, said Latinos have been living in New
Orleans long before the 2005 hurricanes, adding that
Puentes caters to recent immigrants and native Latinos.
“The goal is to help them be more active, more successful
and be participants in what’s happening rather than
being on the sidelines of everything,” he said. “Only a
handful of Latinos that were in the right circles were not on
the sidelines, but what Puentes is saying is more Latinos
need to be on the mainline.”
Puentes is working toward this harmony using a number
of focuses, which include helping people secure affordable
housing, improving public safety and relations with
the criminal justice system, and community organizing
through its LatiNola program.
Diaz believes the potential for functional, diverse communities
in New Orleans can set a precedent for communities
nationwide.
“It’s a very local thing, but I think it has a lot of implications
for people from other places that want to see how
different communities can live together, because that’s
always a challenge across North America,” Diaz said.
“In New Orleans, when it works, and sometimes it
doesn’t work — we had Jim Crow and we still have the
legacy of that — but when it does work, you see really beautiful
things between people of different ethnicities working
and living together and being very comfortable with each
other, which you don’t see too often in the rest of the
United States.”•
— Leah Bartos
Puentes New Orleans executive director Lucas Diaz, center, reviews plans with Jonathon Kim, left, and Jimmy Huck for the group’s LatiNola
community organization.
48A 2008 Innovator of the Year