Boost Language Justice at Your Organization

Welcome to Unbound’s Language Justice Workshop Series

Now enrolling through March 2024

What is Unbound’s Language Justice Workshop Series?

Everyone in your organization has an important role to play in promoting language justice.

These two foundational workshops guide you and your colleagues to answer the questions: What is language justice? How does it support our work? And how do we build, sustain, and promote it?

This offering is the result of 15 combined years of interpretation, translation, and language justice facilitation work and lifetimes of lived experiences as immigrants and children of immigrants navigating language and systemic barriers.

It’s been carefully crafted to serve as an entry point into language justice and to guide you and your organization to achieve deeper understanding and identify concrete next actions that support your work.

What participants will gain

Upon the completion of both workshops, participants will:

1. Increase their clarity in the important role they play in promoting language justice
2. Increase their confidence in explaining what language justice is and looks like
3. Apply key learnings and specific strategies to their work in building language justice
4. Explain how language justice relates to accessibility and communication in any language
5. Develop concrete skills to collaborate with interpreters and translators and other language workers.

Workshops descriptions

Workshop 1: Language Justice 101
In this first workshop, participants will examine the history, meaning, and applications of language justice from multiple perspectives and understandings at the individual, interpersonal, community, and institutional levels. Participants will also identify and evaluate specific change strategies to address language injustice in their work and decenter English-dominant ways of participation.

Workshop 2: Working with Language Workers
Participants will learn about the definitions and applications of interpretation, translation, and other accessibility-centered language work in community-based settings. Participants will then discuss and devise best practices to collaborate with language workers and support communication among linguistically diverse community stakeholders.

We’re excited for you to join!

The fine points:

• Two 3-hour workshops (Language Justice 101 & Working with Language Workers)
• Up to 30 participants
• Virtual on Zoom
• Now scheduling through March 2024
• Rolling applications (first-come, first-serve)
• Limit: 10 organizations or teams of people who can commit to both workshops
• Participants must attend Language Justice 101 before attending Working with Language Workers
• Curriculum adapted to meet the particular needs of your organization
• Co-facilitated by a team of two facilitators: You get the benefit of greater diversity of styles and lived experiences and greater capacity to be responsive to participants.

Are you an organization looking to enroll staff and/or community members?

This program is ideal for your organization if:

• You’re eager to learn more about language justice and how to incorporate it in your work but don’t know where to start. Perhaps there’s too much information out there, or not enough,
• You value connecting with community members who speak languages other than English and this is important to your work, yet you struggle to reach them and create connection.
• You want to dismantle all types of linguistic dominance.
• You know you should collaborate with translators and interpreters and aren’t exactly sure how. Questions you might be asking are: How do I find them? How much should we budget?
• You’re able to identify up to 30 colleagues and team members to participate.
• You understand that learning about language justice is important and also that it takes sustained commitment on the part of yourself, your colleagues, and your organization to achieve long-term impact.

These workshops apply a popular education and a social justice lens.

What does this mean?

Participants will connect language justice to concepts of power, anti-racism, disability justice, and more and situate language justice as an essential tool for building relationships and carrying out their work.

Participants will connect their lived experiences to language justice, building a critical understanding of their role in its promotion.

Participation and Engagement

• The workshops are participatory and combine individual and group activities. At times, participants will be asked to: respond to reflection prompts by journaling or in the chat and on the slides, share out loud in the large group, and work in small breakout groups.
• The workshops are designed to be live. There will be no recordings.
• Participants must attend Language Justice 101 before attending Working with Language Workers.
• Participants will receive a copy of the slides and chat as well as any additional materials shared.
• We will have scheduled breaks during each three-hour workshop.
• Take care of yourself and feel free to stretch, eat, drink, and move.
• Also, feel free to have your cameras on or off.
• Children and furry friends are welcome! 
• Minimize distractions to fully engage with the content and the other participants.
• Have paper/pen or a digital way to take notes for your personal reflections and records.
• How to join:
  • Join from a computer or laptop with a stable internet connection for the best interactive experience.
  • Otherwise, join from a tablet or smartphone so that you can follow along with the slide presentation and other materials. It might be more difficult to fully participate on these devices.
  • Do not join through a phone call, especially on the second workshop as it’s not possible to access the Zoom interpretation feature via a phone call.

Cost: Sliding Scale

The sliding scale for Unbound’s Language Justice Workshop Series is $3,000 to $15,000 for both workshops. The true cost is $7,500.

You choose the amount that best fits your budget within the recommended tiers below.

• If your annual organizational budget is under $600,000, the suggested sliding scale is $3,000 – $4,000 for both workshops. Additional factor: The highest paid staff member is paid less than $70,000/year or there are no staff members
• If your annual organizational budget is $600,000 – $1.5 million, the suggested sliding scale is $4,000 – $5,000 for both workshops. Additional factor: The highest paid staff member is paid between $70,000-$90,000/year.
• If your annual organizational budget is $1.5 – $5 million, the suggested sliding scale is $5,000 – $8,000 for both workshops. Additional factor: The highest paid staff member is paid between $90,000-$150,000/year.
• If your annual organizational budget is over $5 million, the suggested sliding scale is $8,000 – $15,000 for both workshops. Additional factor: The highest paid staff member is paid more than $150,000/year.

If you want to bring these workshops to your organization and have questions about budget and cost, please complete the application form and we can discuss further during our 30-minute virtual meeting.

We thank AORTA for their transparency around cost, which has greatly informed our sliding scale.

Why does Unbound use a sliding scale?

We at Unbound work on a sliding scale as a way to honor and respect organizations’ budgets and as a tool for participating with intention in the solidarity economy. 

Also, even if an organization’s budget is “larger,” they may be just starting to engage in language justice work. We understand that it takes time to build capacity. And we believe we can build capacity together. At the same time, we encourage organizations with access to funds to choose the highest amount they’re comfortable able to so that organizations with truly limited resources can choose the lower ends of the sliding scale.

The solidarity economy is a system and a vision for organizing how we work and care for each other to ensure that people’s basic needs are met while supporting nature and people to thrive.

A sliding scale is one way to help build a solidarity economy: we as workers figure out our basic needs and you as participants contribute how you’re able. In this case, we use money as the exchange because we’re responsible for business and personal expenses. As Unbound’s financial means grow, and with the help of participants who are able to contribute more, we can lower the sliding scale or provide options free of cost. Eventually, we all have our basic needs met and we can continue to learn together to keep on thriving and supporting each other.

What does the starting amount cover?

The sliding scale for Unbound’s Language Justice Workshop Series starts at $3,000 for both workshops.

This starting amount covers our most basic needs as individual worker-owners and the costs of running a cooperative business.

True cost of the program

The true cost of the program is $7,500 for both workshops. This is the amount that truly covers all expenses and resources, including Unbound business expenses and the time invested by our worker-owners.

What does the highest amount cover?

The sliding scale goes up to $15,000 for both workshops.

This is the amount we encourage larger institutions and organizations with access to greater resources to choose.

We ask that groups choose the highest amount they’re comfortably able to afford. Higher sliding scale amounts allow Unbound to have reserves and value the unpaid labor and education we’ve engaged in to get to this point. 

Also, these higher amounts support people and organizations that don’t have the funds to pay more than the starting amount.

What projects do the larger sliding scale amounts fund?

• High school Language Justice program at the O’Bryant School of Math and Science in Boston. This is a student-led, adult-supported program. Your funds provide paid hands-on opportunities for the youth participating in this program and stipends for the student leaders who facilitate it (we’ve run this program as volunteers so far).
• Trainings for immigrants who are speakers of languages other than English — in their own languages —  about their language rights, how to work with interpreters and translators, and how to organize for language justice.

Why is the sliding scale so wide?

We invite organizations to choose an amount that fits their resources, guided by the sliding scale. The sliding scale is wide to allow for flexibility. 

Are there scholarships available for organizations who don’t have the funds to participate in this program?

We at Unbound understand that many organizations aren’t able to pay for professional development or continued learning opportunities.

As we grow as a cooperative, Unbound’s goal is to build a cash reserve from people and organizations who pay at the higher end of our sliding scales to subsidize folks with little or no access to money.

At this time, Unbound doesn’t have the resources to offer this program below the minimum amount on our sliding scale.

We invite groups with limited resources to join forces and apply together.

Topics Covered

Language Justice 101

Learning objectives:
– Examine the history, meaning, and applications of language justice from multiple perspectives and understandings at the individual, interpersonal, community, and institutional levels.
– Identify and evaluate specific change strategies to address language injustice in your work and decenter English-dominant ways of participation.

Topics include:
– Personal experiences related to understanding and communication and what you can learn from them
– Language justice definitions and histories and how these connect to your work
– How visioning and consistent action are key to language justice
– Language justice and its connection to language access
– How language injustice appears within English, too
– Overcoming challenges and identifying specific change strategies
– How you and each stakeholder in your organization play important roles

Working with Language Workers

Learning objectives:
– Define and apply interpretation, translation, and other accessibility-centered language work in community-based settings.
– Discuss and devise best practices to collaborate with language workers and support communication among linguistically diverse community stakeholders.

Topics include:
– What accessibility-centered language work is and when it is used
– Interpretation and translation must-knows to support multilingual communication
– Best practices before, during, and after when working with language workers to support all stakeholders
– Role plays: Concrete takeaways through observation, participation, and analysis

Program history: How did this workshop series come to be?

We at Unbound have personal experience as interpreters, translators, facilitators, and more.

In 2016, Catalina and Loreto started collaborating as social justice interpreters when they participated in the 16-hour Interpreting for Social Justice training developed at Highlander Center almost twenty years ago. Then, in 2019, Angélica and Loreto met at the Boston University Community Interpreting Certificate Program. The three of us collaborated on a research project with immigrant mothers of children with special needs in Massachusetts public schools to learn about their experiences with language injustice in the school system.

The more we worked as interpreters and in other types of language work, the more we realized that capacity building needed to happen long before interpreters or translators were hired. We noticed the same obstacles over and over, and knew that we had to pool our knowledge and experience into educational programs.

In 2022, we piloted these workshops with three organizations. Now, we’re ready to bring them to many more organizations and scale language justice capacity.

These two workshops are our way of offering an entry point to the world of language justice and how to build fruitful collaboration with interpreters, translators, and other language workers.

Praise for Unbound’s Language Justice Workshop Series

“Wonderful set of practices. Very eye opening and necessary. Thank you Unbound!”
Chris L (he/him)
Loan and Outreach Officer
Bangor, Maine

Praise for Unbound’s trainings

“In the early months of the pandemic, when we and so many groups in our ecosystem were scrambling to figure out how to provide language and other kinds of accessibility in the virtual context, Unbound Cooperative stepped in with targeted and creative support. They designed a training workshop for community-based simultaneous interpreters, equipping them with the knowledge and practice time to develop the skills needed to smoothly and successfully provide simultaneous interpretation at Zoom events. This capacity-building training was very well-received and there was a lot of interest by members of our coalitions – we wish we’d had the resources to scale it up.”

Application process

Step 1. Submit application form. Complete this application form with your contact details and information about your organization. You’ll be asked to share times that you’re available to meet for 30 minutes.

Step 2. Zoom 30-minute meeting. We will meet review your application and important program information to make sure that the Language Justice Workshop Series is a good fit for the program.

Step 3. Unbound will reach out with one of the following next steps:

After reviewing your application and within 48 hours of our 30-minutes meeting, Unbound will reach out with one of the following next steps:

Option A: You’re a great fit for the Language Justice Workshop Series! Unbound will send a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) detailing the agreement you and Unbound are making in this program. At this point, you choose dates and the final sliding scale amount.

Option B: This is not a great fit at the moment. Unbound will offer resources and recommendations.

Step 4. Payment due

In order to secure workshop dates, payment will be due within two weeks of the one-on-one initial consultation.

Workshops dates are guaranteed only once full payment is submitted.

Step 5. Attend the workshops!

Unbound will send a Welcome Email for you to forward to your staff and community members with a link to register for the workshops and details on how to best prepare.

Frequently Asked Questions

What can we do if we don’t have the funds for these workshops?

We acknowledge that groups and organizations may not have the funds to host these workshops. We invite and encourage you to invite other groups and organizations that collaborate closely with you to host these workshops together. This way, you can also share lessons learned and have an even greater impact.

Can we invite people from outside our organization to join our workshops?

Yes. Inviting close collaborators from outside the organization to attend these workshops can increase the impact of your language justice work even more.

Can these workshops be customized? How much?

To support each group and organization to the best of our ability, we’ve created the curriculum with customization in mind. We’ve crafted the curriculum with care based on patterns we’ve noticed in our years doing language justice work so participants are able to both explore key concepts and identify actionable next steps. The foundation of the curriculum and learning outcomes remain consistent. However, as we get to know each organization’s vision, needs, and goals (our 30-minute meeting is key for this), we customize the workshops in the examples, scenarios, and prompts we select, in how we frame conversations and activities, and in the particular supplemental materials we prepare.

Our mission at Unbound Language Justice Cooperative is:

To embed language justice at the personal, community, and institutional levels by fostering spaces that support people’s right to collective power, self-determination, and equitable communication.

We’re working towards a vision where:

The values that guide our work are:

As participants in Unbound’s Language Justice Workshop Series, you’ll join us in an experience where learning is: