Living Waters Bridges gaps in communities
South East Coalition partner Living Waters works in Charlotte NC to help families navigate complex systems with confidence and cultural understanding. Through trusted guidance, Living Waters supports residents as they connect with essential local services and community resources.
Early one Monday morning in southeast Charlotte, a parent hesitates at the entrance of a community center, clutching paperwork and questions about school support services. Across the room, a community liaison greets them with calm assurance, ready to translate not just words, but understanding. This moment isn’t unusual. It is everyday work for the South East Coalition, a program powered by Living Waters that helps underserved families navigate complex systems that often feel confusing, overwhelming, or inaccessible.
At the heart of the South East Coalition’s mission is the role of cultural broker and community liaison, people who serve as bridges between government agencies, service providers, and the very communities they aim to support. These roles are essential in helping individuals from diverse backgrounds access the resources they need with dignity, clarity, and cultural respect.
What It Means to Be a Cultural Broker
A cultural broker goes beyond translation. They understand the values, traditions, and daily realities of the communities they serve. In practice, this means helping families and individuals understand how public services, schools, healthcare, and legal systems work, explaining cultural goals and community expectations to government agencies so services are delivered in a respectful and effective way, and strengthening trust between institutions and residents who may have experienced misunderstanding or marginalization in the past.
This approach reduces barriers that often prevent people from receiving help not because services aren’t available, but because they are hard to access without support that speaks both cultural and institutional language. For Living Waters, this is not abstract theory. It is active, everyday engagement that builds trust and opens doors.
The Community Liaison: More Than a Translator
Many people know what a translator does, but a community liaison does much more. At its core, a liaison builds real relationships with individuals, families, and local leaders, identifies barriers that keep people from accessing services and works with service providers to remove them, and bridges gaps between faith communities, schools, public health departments, and government offices.
This work helps people in the South East Coalition’s network feel seen and supported. For example, parents trying to engage with their child’s school can get guidance on communication expectations, advocacy tools, and how to make their voices heard in a system that might otherwise seem distant or intimidating.
Why Cultural Brokering Matters for Underserved Populations
For many in underserved communities, including immigrants, refugees, communities of color, and low-income families, systems like healthcare, education, and government programs can feel foreign. That’s where South East Coalition’s cultural brokers make a difference.
Cultural brokering builds trust. Historical injustices and past negative experiences with institutions can create distrust. Cultural brokers listen and respond in ways that build confidence and respect. It also prevents miscommunication. Everyone communicates differently, and brokers help both sides understand each other’s intentions, needs, and expectations. This leads to better outcomes. People are more likely to follow through with support services like healthcare, schooling, or mental health resources when they feel understood. Cultural brokering makes that possible. It also honors cultural strengths. Rather than forcing people to fit into systems that don’t reflect their lives, cultural brokers help systems adapt to community needs, building solutions that work with culture, not against it.
How the South East Coalition Fosters Cooperative Change
The South East Coalition operates with a clear purpose: to strengthen underserved communities by empowering them to engage with the systems that affect their lives. This work relies on partnership and collaboration with civic leaders, government agencies, faith communities, and grassroots groups.
The Coalition’s community liaison and cultural brokering efforts support this by building reciprocal communication so parents, teachers, and community organizations understand each other and work together. They create culturally relevant programs by listening and designing support based on real cultural priorities. They support trauma-informed mental health strategies by connecting faith communities and health providers, ensuring culturally appropriate understanding of trauma and healing. They engage faith-based networks, as churches and community organizations are trusted voices that help bring people into supportive systems.
This work doesn’t just connect people to services. It creates ongoing, trusted partnerships that grow stronger over time.
Real Impact: Navigating Complex Systems with Confidence
When a family struggles to access health services, a South East Coalition liaison doesn’t just point them to a phone number. They explain what to expect, prepare families for appointments or meetings, follow up to ensure information was understood and needs were met, and connect them with follow-up support if needed.
This level of support helps community members navigate systems with greater confidence and success rather than feeling alone or intimidated. That outcome, empowerment, is at the heart of Living Waters’ work.
FAQs
- What is the South East Coalition?
It is a community empowerment initiative led by Living Waters that brings together faith groups, organizations, government partners, and residents to strengthen underserved neighborhoods. - What does a community liaison do?
A liaison builds trust, explains systems, and connects people with resources in ways that respect cultural values and lived experience. - How does cultural brokering help families?
Cultural brokering ensures that services speak to a family’s cultural context, making systems easier to navigate and more effective. - Is this only for immigrant communities?
While especially valuable for immigrant families, cultural brokering supports all underserved groups facing barriers to understanding or accessing services.
The role of the South East Coalition as a cultural broker and community liaison is central to Living Waters’ mission to support underserved communities. By bridging gaps between government systems and grassroots leaders, the Coalition ensures that help is not just available but understandable, respectful, and effective. This work strengthens trust, promotes inclusion, and ensures that every person can navigate complex systems with dignity and confidence. The South East Coalition does more than connect people with services. It connects people with opportunity.
Join Living Waters to support underserved communities
Living Waters serves as an independent link to faith-based communities to collaborate and partner with public and private sectors. We assist communities to establish and implement new goals.