The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted New Jersey’s Latino Community, with Latinos having the highest rates of COVID infection and COVID related deaths.  For those of us in the Latino community, this is not just a statistic.  Over the past year and a half we have lost far too many family members and friends to this deadly virus.  I will not even try to list those Latinos who were close to me that perished during this pandemic because my time allotment today will not allow it.

In the coming years, we will see many studies that try to figure out why Latinos were overrepresented by the negative impacts of this pandemic.  However, those of us on the ground in the community see the causes first hand.  We know that Latinos were more likely to work in jobs that did not allow them shelter in place by working from home.  At the height of the pandemic, Latinos continued to work on the front lines providing essential services to New Jerseyans at great risk to their lives.  Too many did not survive. For those that did survive, too many ended up worse off than they already were prior to the pandemic.

As the Governor has said on many occasions, the pandemic did not create inequity in communities of color, but it has laid those inequities bare.

Latino Community based organizations have a long history of providing much needed direct outreach and social services to hard to reach Latino and immigrant communities throughout New Jersey.  However, funding to these organizations which has always been inadequate has been severely cut over the past decade.

If we are to make sure that all New Jerseyans participate in the recovery from this pandemic, we have to make additional investments in communities that were already behind prior to the pandemic and have fallen further behind during the pandemic.

The Latino Action Network asks that American Rescue Plan funds be used to: