SILER CITY — The Hispanic Liaison got just what it wanted with Bryant Parroquin and Maria Gomez Flores, the organization’s two new hires.
Parroquin and Gomez Flores are both UNC-Chapel Hill alumni and grew up in Siler City.
“I’m super excited about having local youth that come back and work with us,” Executive Director Ilana Dubester said. “That’s been my dream since I saw them as children.”
Parroquin is the marketing communications manager — a new position that the Hispanic Liaison has never had.
“So I’m in charge of social media, keeping up with the social media, making sure information is brought out to the community and in a timely manner as well.” he said. “I’m also in charge of making sure we’re communicating with other organizations. If another organization reaches out to us and like, ‘Hey, can you disperse this information? Can you do this for us?’ I’ll be the point of contact for that.”
Parroquin said this position allows him to grow professionally and give back.
“What really caught my eye about the position was that it was communications and marketing, a field that I wanted to grow into,” he said. “Also, it gives me an opportunity to give back to my community in an organization that’s done so much for my community.”
Gomez Flores is the advocacy and civic engagement program manager — a position that combined her interests.
“For a while, I was working at a law firm as a paralegal, but I realized that the elections (were approaching), and the election is so critical, and I realized that I was just sitting at a computer scanning documents, and I thought that I needed to do more for the community,” she said. “I thought there was a good opportunity since it combined politics and the Latinx community, I just thought it was a great mix for me to be in.”
Gomez Flores said her role is important for information accessibility for the Latinx community and it’s something she wants to increase beyond the election year.
“I think it’s very important for me to create accessibility to local government and access to that information,” she said. “We have a big immigrant community and Spanish-speaking population. So it is harder for them to access information. So it’s this kind of information that I do want to be able to create a program or manage the program in order to make sure the Latinx community, the Spanish community, has access to information.”
News Intern Olivia Rojas can be reached at olivia@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @oliviamrojas.