New Mexico Black Leadership Council

A group of local Black-led organizations held a kickoff on Tuesday for a campaign to educate and encourage eligible Black New Mexicans to vote.

The New Mexico Black Leadership Council is asking Albuquerque residents to shop local and at Black-owned businesses this year. The council’s end-of-year newsletter features local operations and ideas for holiday shopping.

Communities of color have long been underserved here in New Mexico––an issue only highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, a new initiative launched by the New Mexico Black Leadership Council looks to change this by connecting them more easily to essential services.

In New Mexico 30,000 immigrant families were excluded from stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, and other safety net programs which are unavailable to undocumented workers, even if they were in frontline or essential jobs. A coalition of immigrant aid organizations is working to increase assistance to those families across the state through cash transfers, which have proven to be an effective means of helping families stay afloat during the COVID-19 crisis across the nation.

The 2020 Census is coming up this spring. The once-every-decade survey determines how much federal funding New Mexico gets for things like food and…