Illinois Honors Cesar Chavez, Immigrant Volunteers
“Service to others is the rent we pay for our place on Earth,” Quinn said at a ceremony in Chicago.
“Cesar Chavez spent his life working to improve the lives of others and our Uniting America volunteers live his legacy every day by going out into their communities to make a difference,” the governor said of the United Farm Workers founder, who was born March 31, 1927, and died April 23, 1993.
Participating in the tribute were members of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, or ICIRR, which sponsors Uniting America along with the Governor’s Office of New Americans.
The volunteers work statewide on projects that range from cleaning up parks and schools to collecting funds and offering citizenship workshops to immigrants.
“Through our Uniting America program, our fellows are immersed in communities working to build bridges and create healthy dialogues between immigrant and native born communities,” ICIRR Executive Director Lawrence Benito said.
He said that on its agenda for 2012, Uniting America has scheduled more than 100 community meetings in the hope of recruiting and training more than 8,000 additional volunteers to work with immigrants.
Benito said that ICIRR has conducted 1,200 citizenship workshops over the past seven years and performed more than 100,000 hours of volunteer work.
Estimates are that about 20 percent of the population of Illinois are immigrants or the children of immigrants.
The Governor’s Office of New Americans, headed by Denise Martinez, was created in 2004 to develop policies to support immigrants and their families, without regard for their immigration status.