Best Practices for Multilingual Outreach—Boston

The population of Asians in the United States has more than doubled since 2000 including within U.S.-born and immigrant populations. And according to the Pew Research Center, 63% of U.S. Asians speak a language other than English at home. Rajawali Foundation Institute of Asia AAPI Research Leads Jacqueline Chen (MPP 2026) and Katherine Waltman (MPP 2028) spoke with local government practitioners to glean best practices for supporting immigrant communities through language access initiatives. 

Language access in local government is shaped in part by Section 203 of the federal Voting Rights Act, which requires certain jurisdictions to provide language assistance for voting when a single language-minority community meets population size, limited-English proficiency, and illiteracy thresholds—criteria that frequently applies to Asian and immigrant communities. As of 2021, more than 330 jurisdictions nationwide were covered under these requirements. While Section 203 applies narrowly to voting, it has also helped establish language access as a broader civil rights and democratic participation issue, prompting many cities to extend multilingual practices across public services that immigrant communities rely on most.   

Boston is widely regarded as a best-practice model because it goes beyond federal minimums. The dedicated Mayor’s Office of Language and Communications Access employs data-driven thresholds for vital information and forms sustained partnerships with community-based organizations to ensure outreach is both linguistically and culturally appropriate for diverse immigrant populations.  

Jeniffer Vivar-Wong is the Director of the Mayor’s Office of Language and Communications Access, which works with 90+ departments and teams across the City of Boston to coordinate language access. Monique Tú Nguyen is the Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement, which serves the 200,000+ immigrants that call the City of Boston home.  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

What would you say are the biggest obstacles you faced in providing multilingual outreach?  

Jeniffer: One obstacle is funding. When we are thinking about providing translation and interpretation services across the many departments, you really do need an investment and sufficient funds to execute culturally competent services.  

Monique: Especially for non-English speakers, there’s a lack of awareness, or even a lack of trust or dependability of governments to provide information, even vital information, in the most critical times in language. So we have to do a lot of ongoing, consistent engagement with the community to build that trust.  

Jeniffer, can you speak to how you coordinate across all the offices you work with?  

Jeniffer: We have the way that we approach implementing the ordinance of the city, which is ensuring language access through vital information programs and services across departments. We took all the departments and we actually divided them up into tiers. Some departments are vital—they provide emergency services, they provide information that is most crucial to our communities and that we need to make sure are culturally competent and accessible. And then we have departments in tier two and tier three, which are front-facing departments that also are engaging with community members, but they may not have life-saving information available to constituents. Then our last tier of departments is our internal departments. Those are departments that don’t really interact with our communities. We sit down with the departments in each tier, and we work with them to identify what are the main programs and services that are constituent-facing, what is the most vital information within your office, and work with them to create language accessibility plans for these programs. Our training team trains its departments on how to use our contracts for interpretation and translation services.  

We also have a city-wide language line service, which any department can call 24/7 and get an interpreter on the line. For example, if somebody comes in to pay a parking ticket and they need an interpreter, they can just call the interpreter on the line. And then we also partner with Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) in the community who provide a cultural review of vital documents and information.  

We also have a contract specifically for Certified Deaf Interpreters, American Sign Language interpreters and our communications access in real time that is for our communities who are deaf and blind, hard of hearing or have low vision. 

How do you ensure that materials are not just linguistically but culturally appropriate? 

Monique: We would try to know the communities well. It’s not enough to know what country they’re from, what language they’re from, but also learning what area of the country or region that they may be from or lineage, because of the different dialects. We even leverage our city partners who might be of that neighborhood or that community and do on-the-ground research by talking to people to find out what language and what culturally specific way is best to communicate with folks. Often the channels that we may use, like our newsletter, the media, and social media might not even be sufficient to reach them. We try to do some investigation to find out how to make sure that our information gets in the right hands in the best ways.  

How do you decide what languages to even offer for translation? What is the tipping point? 

Jeniffer: For our office, we actually work with Census data and the American Community Survey, which gives us insights into what languages meet the threshold in our ordinance. If 1000 people self-identified as Spanish speakers, and they spoke English “less than very well,” that automatically triggers that language being a threshold language. At the City of Boston, we have 11 threshold languages when it comes to written and 10 languages when it comes to spoken.  

Let’s say you’re an organization or a local government that really is starting from scratch. What are the quick wins or simple steps that an organization could take to improve language accessibility? 

Jeniffer: When you’re thinking about quick wins, you have to think long term about the quality of services that we’re providing, because, to Monique’s point, language access is not just checking off a box, it’s a tool that we can use to build trust with the communities that we’re serving. And so I think one of the quick wins is really understanding who that community is and knowing their needs, knowing what it is that they view as the most vital pieces of a government, which will then help you understand. You may not have the largest budget, but where do I prioritize? Everything is uniquely important to communities in different ways, but that way you can then hone in on prioritizing those needs. And so I think understanding their needs will ultimately lead to a better provision of services and quality of services for our constituents.  

Monique: Yeah, I think it’d be a very quick win. It could even be internal before you’ve been launched, because planning ahead is so critical in regard to language access. As soon as you think about any type of outreach plan, put language access at the forefront, even reaching out to those communities at the forefront first. So if you can solve for reaching out to those specific communities at the center, everything else will be easy. Oftentimes, language access, interpretation and translation is an afterthought, and by the time you figure that out, it’s too late and the quality of the interpretation translation is really bad. I would say even the quick win would be deciding to make this step to ensure language access or even working with teams to make sure that everyone is on the same page about the commitment to follow through on ensuring language access for the community. And that it is not something charitable, but it’s something required for a civically engaged and empowered community. You know, because one thing that’s key to highlight is that our city is one-fourth foreign-born. And even more than that, there are more people for whom English is not their first language. So it’s vital that we are able to communicate with them in a language that’s most significant and most powerful for them. 

What does the gold standard in multilingual outreach look like for your team? For example, what should an organization like a political campaign do if they’re thinking about reaching out to multilingual voters?  

Monique: Even making a choice whether or not to engage with them is deciding if they’re important enough as a voter or not. Making that decision is a value statement. Who you speak to, who you engage throughout the campaign is key. I would say, first learn where these folks are from. How do they communicate, who do they talk to, and where do they get information from? Even engaging at the start with key people who are influential in that community can be leveraged for trust building and relationships. Getting them to be proximate experts on those communities and “Bridgers”. There are people very happy to be utilized for that, because if you build trust with them, they will feel competent and trust that you will use that relationship for good. If you have a town hall or in-person meeting to appeal to these voters, I would have things translated even in that small meeting. Start small, and then you take them all the way, so it’s from A to Z. There are no gaps in between, like there’s some times we communicate with them in their language, some times we don’t. Consistency is key for the trust-building and dependability. It’s a cycle. It’s not something that starts and ends. It’s an ongoing commitment to engaging everybody. 

Can you speak to some lessons you’ve learned in providing language access services?  

Jeniffer: I think one thing that we’ve learned is that intentionality really matters when it comes to what we’re translating. We don’t translate every single document that comes out of the city, but we’re very intentional about what does get translated and how it gets translated, and how it looks. When you’re thinking about the Arabic language, one thing that we learned throughout our years working with that community and our vendors was that when we’re creating flyers, the Arabic language is formatted from right to left, rather than from left to right. Visually, all the other visual factors of part of that document could also be from left to right, and I think it sounds like something simple, but it really does mean a lot to the community who is receiving it. Because you go from, “oh, this is just a translated material” to “this material was made for us, for our community, and they really know who we are, what we need, what we’re used to,” and it’s respectful to those communities.  

Can you share what success looks like for you?  

Monique: We have a leadership development program, and when I came into the office a couple of years ago, that program was run solely in English. I really do believe that you don’t need to be an English speaker to be a leader in the city. There are community members who organize and do so many things for the community that are not conducted in English. So, we really wanted to make sure our program was language accessible. We’ve had three cycles where we experimented and practiced doing the whole program. And for me, the beauty of seeing what language access does for community members who talk to one another yet don’t share the same language is probably the most powerful experience, especially for non-English speakers. Otherwise, you are siloed and also very isolated from the rest of the community because you don’t speak English. With language access through interpretation and translation, that barrier is removed. And it’s so powerful to see that despite people not sharing the same language, they’re able to work together to create solutions and learn that even though they might be different from different cultures and community groups, they go through the same problems, and that means that they can also figure out solutions together. The result of the program would be that they were able to come up with team projects, and they did it all without speaking English to each other. So English speakers, Haitian Creole speakers, Spanish speakers, they all were able to work together to create a solution. And not only were they able to build things together, they built lifelong relationships. It’s pretty cool seeing that people feel empowered, and for once in their life, they don’t have to be feeling that they’re second-tier because they don’t speak English. Seeing that is really what makes it all worthwhile.  

Jacqueline Chen (MPP 2026) is an AAPI Research Lead for the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia. 

Katherine Waltman (MPP 2028) is an AAPI Research Lead for the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia. 

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily represent the positions of the Ash Center or its affiliates.