The "Comadre" Project: An Asset-Based Design Approach to Connecting Low-Income Latinx Families to Out-of-School Learning Opportunities

Participation in out-of-school learning programs has been shown to generate significant academic, social/emotional, and institutional benefits for young learners, and today's wealthy families are disproportionately reaping these benefits. This paper presents the results of an asset-based/human-centered design research process and pilot aimed at connecting low-income families in a Southern California city with local low-cost out-of-school learning opportunities. Based on background research including qualitative interviewing, home visits, technology inventories and use walkthroughs with 40 low-income, majority Latinx families, we created and piloted a free subscription SMS service that automatically pushes bilingual SMS messages with curated information on local low-cost enrichment learning opportunities to low-income families. We framed our human-centered design process through an intersectional, "asset-based approach," which recognizes that marginalized communities have already developed robust, culturally-specific social practices to enable them to navigate the world, seeks to amplify them, and refrains from imposing a top-down or pre-conceived "idea" of intervention.