There is no justice ⚖️ without language justice!

 

We held the second Language Justice Convening in Whatcom County on March 4, 2025 with 80 health and human services, nonprofit, school district, interpreters and indigenous community representatives. We appreciate everyone who attended and gave their time and energy to this important cause.

 

This event wouldn't have been possible without our partners. Thank you to Mount Baker Foundation, WECU, Whatcom County Health and Community Services, and Otherside Bagel Co for supporting this convening and language access in our community. We are also thankful for our collaborators and fellow language justice advocates who helped to organize the event including - Whatcom County Health and Community Services, Opportunity Council, and North Sound Leap. Additional thanks to Berzenji Productions & Media for capturing the many important takeaways from this convening on film.

 

During this convening we welcomed guest speaker and deaf language justice advocate, James Dino Christianson Jr. who spoke on the history of ASL as a language and the importance of creating accessibility for the deaf community. We were also joined by Joana Ramos from Washington State Coalition of Language Access (WASCLA) and Lee Che Leong from the Coalition for Health Care Language Access. 

 

We heard from Betsy Camacho-John and Martha Mendoza about the impact of the SeaMar Promotores in our community. We learned about Augmentative and Augmentative and Alternative Communication devices from Tasha Farbee SLP with Whatcom Center for Early Learning. Also from Western Washington University we had Kristin Denham (Linguistics), Andrew Blick (OCE), and Kirsten Drickey (Spanish)- share about their work toward the creation of LangWA, an initiative for applied linguistics; language-centered research and teaching; and community engagement focused on language study.