The Iowa Vital Voices Project: Promoting Latino civic engagement, political voice, and community health
April 10 @ 3:15 pm - 5:00 pm
The Iowa Vital Voices Project (IVVP) uplifts Latino voices and collects actionable data to advance civic engagement and health in Iowa. It is a partnership between the League of United Latin American Citizens of Iowa (LULAC—the nation’s oldest and largest Hispanic civil rights organization), and the University of Iowa and co-led by 3 principal investigators: Julianna Pacheco (University of Iowa, Department of Political Science), Nicole Novak (University of Iowa, Department of Community and Behavioral Health), and Nicholas Salazar (League of United Latin American Citizens of Iowa, LULAC).
Our project is heavily guided by a Community Advisory Board (CAB) of 8 LULAC leaders from 7 councils throughout the state of Iowa. LULAC leaders are intimately familiar with the landscape for civic engagement and voting rights in their specific communities and support their Latina/o and immigrant neighbors in becoming civically and politically engaged.
Our research is focused on solutions to, and remedies for, policies that negatively impact community health for Latinos living in Iowa. We seek to better understand how political power (or lack thereof) contributes to health equity. We center voices from the Latinx community who are most affected by a lack of political representation. We envision an Iowa where all residents feel motivated and empowered to improve their communities, to run for office, and to be civically engaged, regardless of race, language, or place of birth.
The Panelists:
Nick Salazar currently serves as the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Council 371 in Muscatine, Iowa. He is also the president of the board of the Diversity Service Center of Iowa, an immigrant legal services organization in Muscatine. In addition to his community leadership, Salazar works in Muscatine as a Supply Chain Manager at Kraft Heinz, the same company his family members worked for when they moved to Iowa from Texas in the 1960s. Salazar’s nominators (for the award as an Iowa Public Health Hero, an award that he received in 2025) wrote that he emerged as a public health leader during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he and other LULAC leaders were some of the first Iowans to sound the alarm about risk to meatpacking workers who were classed as essential workers and continued working in close quarters with limited protections, especially in the early days of the pandemic. Salazar and other LULAC leaders advocated for safer working conditions, access to testing and vaccination, and expanded access to pandemic relief resources. More recently, he has worked with University of Iowa faculty members Nicole Novak and Julianna Pacheco on the Iowa Vital Voices Project, a participatory action research project focused on civic engagement and political voice as a root determinant of health for Latinos in Iowa.
Nicole Novak is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Community and Behavioral Health at the University of Iowa College of Public Health. She holds a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Michigan and a Master of Science degree in Medical Anthropology and Global Health Science from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She graduated from St. Olaf College with majors in Spanish, Hispanic Studies and Environmental Studies. Novak has worked with numerous community organizations, including the League of United Latin American Citizens of Iowa, the Center for Worker Justice of Eastern Iowa, the Prairielands Freedom Fund, and California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, to conduct research and public engagement related to community health, immigration enforcement, civil rights and reproductive justice.
Moderator: Professor Emily Carroll, Department of Nursing and HealthFinders Collaborative