Check out the full October 2023 RIM Newsletter here.

This October, NACCHO had the opportunity to sit down with Katie Miller and Francisco Díaz Pinelo from Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM) to learn a little bit about their incredible work. CDM “supports Mexico-based migrant workers to defend and protect their rights as they move between their home communities in Mexico and their workplaces in the United States.”

CDM has offices in Baltimore, Mexico City, and Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca.

Katie Miller, Project Manager and Public Liaison of the Baltimore office, and Francisco Díaz Pinelo, Communications Lead in Mexico City, walked us through the work CDM is doing to improve the lives of their refugee, immigrant, and migrant communities.

CDM serves a wide range of RIM communities across several locations.

“We do a lot of digital communications because of the fact that a lot of the populations we work with move a lot and are often in really isolated locations without a lot of transportation,” said Miller.

She noted that some people live hours away from the nearest health department, and there is a huge lack of public transportation.

“During the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we started to develop relationships with local and state health departments. We saw a lot of resources concentrated there, and we also saw a gap between what we were hearing from workers and the access that local health departments and state health departments and other health entities were offering,” continued Miller.

Miller and Díaz Pinelo attribute a lot of their success to the relationships they’ve built throughout this project.

CDM founded a work group under a different project that gave health departments the opportunity to come and discuss strategies to better serve and reach RIM communities.

“When we saw the NACCHO funding opportunity come up, we realized we could really enhance and build on that workgroup, and so what the NACCHO funding has allowed us to do is bring in professional facilitators for that work group,” said Miller.

“We hold [the workgroup] normally once a month and what we do is if we have some communication projects or strategies that we would like to implement, we work through them through a set of questions. It’s similar to a focus group but there’s also a lot of dialogue going on.” This ensures that they are leading their communication efforts with RIM populations in mind. These facilitators bring lots of customizable resources and vaccination materials. Miller noted that 100% of participants in these sessions found the information and resources to be extremely helpful.

To learn more about CDM’s work, check out their website here.