La Oportunidad

La Oportunidad helps Latinos boost capacity, nurture relationships and improve future potential through family centered support programs.

Mission

La Oportunidad achieves its mission, to champion the development of Latino individuals and families to create a strong, peaceful community, by assisting Latinos of all ages to develop practical skills, improve educational outcomes, build and maintain family stability and achieve long-term success.

For 25 years La Oportunidad has been a recognized and leading provider of bilingual and bicultural educational and supportive programs to help Latinos develop skills necessary to build strong, peaceful families and communities with four core programs.

Programs

El Camino (The Path) Children’s Program provides weekly after-school groups and a summer program for Latino children ages 5-11.  The program focuses on cultural education and building life skills to help children develop positive attitudes and behaviors, improve academic achievement and reduce their vulnerability to negative behaviors in adolescence.

The Latino Youth Program provides weekly after- school groups, a summer program and a special one-day Peace and Leadership Conference for Latino youth ages 12-18.  The program includes cultural education and activities, leadership development, financial literacy, academic support and exploration of post-secondary education planning. 

The Padres Parenting Program provides year-round classes to empower Latino parents with the tools necessary to support their children's education, raise healthy, well-adjusted children who will contribute to their communities and improve family stability.

The Latinos Ending Abuse Program (LEAP) provides year-round classes to Latino men and women to give them the tools, education, and support necessary to help eliminate violent behaviors in their relationships, families, and communities.

New Activities

Early Literacy Programming:  Structured curriculum, based on book-centered activities such as crafts, games, writing exercises and drama, provide early literacy programming to children ages 4-12 who accompany their parents to their Padres program. 

Young Professionals Program: Responding to a critical community need, in the summer of 2013 La Oportunidad created its Young Professionals Program. The program was so successful that in 2014 it was fully implemented and integrated into La Oportunidad’s regular and ongoing programming. This program seeks to empower immigrants: young adults (many of them are from Somalia or from Latin America) and also high school Latinos either first or second generation immigrants so they can ascend on the social pyramid. In order to achieve this, we are providing training that emphasizes on:  1) human relations and communications: adapting to the new environment and being effective in their communication/relationships with people from other backgrounds, 2) education with a focus: going through special trainings, taking college credit during high school, finding and applying for higher education financial aid, and matching their skills, talents and interests with career choices, and 3) job process: getting the necessary training, coaching and support to find and keep a job by providing opportunities for job shadowing, networking, job search and online job applications, resume building, cover letters, references and mock  job interviews with professionals in their field of interest.

Camila's Story

“Camila,” one of the students of the young professionals program at La Oportunidad site, shared her feelings about how the program helped her:  “What I like the most about the Young Professionals program was to learn about “values” because now I know the importance of living in agreement with our values and I am using that knowledge in my school, it is working well.  I also learned about Advance Placement classes, right now I am not taking any of those classes but I am working my way towards it so next year I can.  Taking those classes will save me some money and time because those classes are dual credit: good for high school and good for college”.