El Futuro employees playfully tease the normally self-deprecating Executive Director Luke Smith about being the center of attention for a change.
families and the connected systems. I think that is something that we crave in some sense in America, in our disconnected trajectories. Then I went to medical school, and I didn’t use my Spanish much. I came to North Carolina … and there weren’t super great translation services or interpreter services at the time. I said I spoke a little bit of Spanish, but it wasn’t much. [I began working as an interpreter, and] I’d drive to work with notecards on my steering wheel, trying to learn vocabulary. At night I’d watch telenovelas. I realized that there’s a really big need here. [As a resident, Luke began volunteering at a primary care clinic in Carrboro.] I went over there on Monday nights and volunteered after hours. I think I caught every fourth word. I loved it, even though I came home with these huge headaches – my head was going to explode D e c e m b e r / J a n u a r y
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[from trying to translate]! I remember grabbing other psychiatry residents and saying, ‘Hey, you ought to come over here, too.’ That’s maybe an endearing feature that I have that helps me grow things. Before long, we had a nucleus of people. At one point we said, ‘OK, we need to get someone who’s naïve and a little idealistic to help us grow this idea’ … and I realized, ‘Oh, that’s me!’ So I stressed a lot about how to write a grant and mobilize the community. We decided early on that we needed to make it a one-stop shop because people can get lost in the system. And people need to build some kind of institutional trust. … I think that was one of the first things we did that was pivotal and seismic. Then we said we’d set some goals for el futuro. That’s where [the name] El Futuro came from. It was in 2004 that we founded it. d u r h a m m a g . c o m
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