Message from the President and CEO, Cass Isidro
We pay tribute and sincerely honor the generations of our Hispanic community who have positively enriched, elevated, and influenced our nation and society and reflect on their histories, cultures, experiences, and contributions. The Amputee Coalition honors two significant celebrations: National Hispanic Heritage Month and our unwavering commitment to the limb loss and limb difference community. As a national nonprofit dedicated to intersectionality, these observances elevate the power of diversity, connectedness, resilience, and the beauty of heritage and identity in our community members.
Our diversity in the community is celebrated and a priority for the Amputee Coalition. We know Latino Americans are one-and-a-half times more likely to experience amputation for any reason than white Americans, and 30% more likely to experience a major amputation related to a diabetic foot infection than white Americans. Hispanics/Latinx are one of the fastest-growing historically underrepresented racial/ethnic groups in the United States. They experience some of the highest mortality rates of chronic conditions, such as diabetes, chronic liver, and kidney diseases. Hispanic/Latinx patients additionally experience social and structural barriers to health such as language, lack of health insurance, and limited health literacy, and are subject to discriminatory and exclusionary policies. We are working to support, educate, and advocate for change to lessen this burden and improve health outcomes.
Because people representing every demographic all around the world are part of the limb loss and limb difference community, improving accessibility and usability are top priorities of the Amputee Coalition. We have a newly added website accessibility feature helping to break down the language barrier and our community can access our website resources in over 40 languages. Our bilingual publications are one of the numerous ways we commit to language inclusion and meeting people where they are to reach hundreds of thousands of people. in 2022 alone, 28% of the Amputee Coalition’s over 500,000 website users viewed resources in Spanish. 2023 marked a momentous day for the Hispanic amputee community with the launch of the Amputee Coalition’s first fully Spanish-speaking support group in partnership with Angel City Sports.
As we celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month alongside the Limb Loss and Limb Difference community, we honor the opportunity to come alongside the diversity of our world as we stay committed to our organizational vision: A world where our community thrives.