The Office of County Administration’s (OCA) Language Access Team recently had the opportunity to attend the Welcoming Interactive conference in Detroit, Michigan. The Welcoming Interactive is a biennial conference that highlights successful practices, programs, and policies, focused on immigrant inclusion within communities across the United States. The conference is hosted by Welcoming America, a nonpartisan and nonprofit organization focused on helping communities develop policies that foster inclusive and prosperous communities. Attendees of the Welcoming Interactive conference learn about local innovations at the intersection of immigration and topics such as climate change, employment, and language access.
Over the past year, the Research and Analysis Division (RAD) Language Access Team has worked on completing a needs assessment of gaps in language access for Harris County services. Exploration into language needs has included collecting and analyzing internal Harris County data, data on limited English proficient (LEP) county residents, as well as interviewing community groups and partners within the County. The Language Access Team is now in the process of utilizing the collected data to implement a sustainable language access plan for Harris County departments. Additionally, the Language Access Team continues to learn from and collaborate with other jurisdictions and experts in the language access field within spaces such as the 2025 Welcoming Interactive in Detroit. By attending this conference, as well as hearing diverse perspectives and valuable insights from experts, the Language Access Team is better able to understand the concerns of Harris County Residents as well as the existing landscape of language access services in the County.
Language access sessions within this conference provided detailed insight into language access planning, especially within government agencies. Sessions covered topics such as improving the quality of local language access, language access planning guides for jurisdictions, and community-centered language justice practices. The Team got to hear from experts and language access managers across states as theyshared in-depth knowledge of inventive policies and procedures implemented within their jurisdictions, as well as analyses of their effectiveness and efficiency within their respective communities.
At the Language Access Planning: A Guide for Local, State, and Federal Entities session, language access personnel from San Antonio, the City of Cambridge, and the City of Boston shared their experiences in building and managing language access policies and procedures within their respective local governments. Sessions included information such as the ways these jurisdictions dictate document vitalness for translation, where documents and programs are divided into tiers based on priority. In the
Improving Quality of Language Access session, the Language Access Team also attended sessions that focused on creative means to evaluate language access procedures, such as utilizing “secret shoppers” to assess their public-facing staff’s ability to assist limited English proficient residents. The Team also learned the importance of facilitating sustainable working relationships between staff and third-party vendors to provide valuable feedback to streamline vendor processes and overall services to better serve residents.
The conference also offered a unique full day of peer-to-peer learning exclusively for language access experts. The “Language Access Bootcamp” was led by the Municipal Language Access Network (MLAN), a network of language access personnel focused on language access in their respective municipalities. MLAN’s Language Access Bootcamp provided multiple lecture sessions covering topics ranging from case studies of language access planning in other jurisdictions to creating budgets within agencies for language access.
As a member of MLAN and an attendee of the Bootcamp, the Language Access Team was able to turn to peers and experts for solutions to niche, governmental challenges of language access planning, while also building relationships for further collaboration in the future. For example, a challenge unique to local governments deals with the procurement of third-party vendors to provide interpretation and translation services. Most jurisdictions follow a bidding process for a vendor, which can ensure that local governments are paying reasonable prices for services, but can also potentially lead to quality issues for both staff and residents if price is the only factor considered when hiring a vendor. The Team learned how language access experts from MLAN created processes to select a vendor that was not only cost-effective for their jurisdiction but also most efficient for residents by creating internal expectations and requirements of vendors that are communicated during the bidding process.
The 2025 Welcoming Interactive gave the Language Access Team valuable opportunities to build relationships with peers and learn from the approaches of other localities. Networking moments both in and outside of sessions often sparked insightful exchanges about emerging practices and shared challenges. These interactions allowed the team to gain a broader understanding of how different regions are navigating language accessibility in diverse contexts. The connections formed throughout the conference inform how the team supports more responsive and inclusive language access efforts in Harris County.
