WATERLOO -- It's been a long year for El Centro Latinoamericano.

After funding shortfalls promised a reduction in services provided by the organization, director Jenifer Arnold abruptly announced her decision to leave for a job with the Iowa Department of Human Services.

She'll be replaced starting today{M3 by Gina Cassis, current president of El Centro's board of advisers.

El Centro is a Spanish language crisis intervention center. Founded in 2001, its purpose is to aid Spanish-speaking residents with things like job applications, immigration papers and general interpretation.

Leaving was a lifestyle choice for Arnold. El Centro, a small organization based in Waterloo, was unable to provide her with the things a person just starting out in life needed, she said. There was no benefits package, no heath or dental, and she made very little. Thoughts of starting a family with her husband redefined the need for those benefits.

However, she said, she'd enjoyed the work, spending a year as the second director in El Centro's short history.

"It's been a very positive experience," she said. "I'm very sorry to leave."

But there were other things. In her year at El Centro, she'd been trying to expand the services to benefit the primarily Spanish-speaking residents of Cedar Valley. She'd envisioned participating in a 24-hour Spanish language radio stations and educational classes. The idea, she said, was for El Centro to be able to help its clients not just in times of crisis but at all times as they adapted to life in English-speaking America.

But Arnold could not expand the services on her own. More full-time help was needed, and grant requests for the year reflected this. Unfortunately, a $147,000 grant request to the United Way was turned down, and El Centro, due to other expired grants and changes in funding, found itself worse off than it had been the year before.

For 2005, it was given $65,000. In 2006, it had been able to come up with only $40,000.

Such variances in funding, Arnold said, factored in to her decision to leave.

"The fact that we're very dependent on grants makes the job more unstable," she said.

Into Arnold's shoes steps Cassis, formerly of Wells Fargo Bank. Cassis will be the El Centro's third director. She served on its board of advisers as president for more than a year before she was approached about taking over the directorship.

With her, she brings an administrative background, which she hopes will translate into a more streamlined approach to funding strategies. As president, Cassis brought on an administrative accountant, a job that was previously done, like much of El Centro's work, by a volunteer.

Cassis, recently from Florida, found herself drawn to the cause of assisting Spanish-speaking residents. She found herself the only bilingual person at the bank at the time and knew, through both the language barrier and customs of America, those recently transplanted sometimes had difficulty dealing with everyday things.

"I consider El Centro to have huge value to the community," she said. "It's the only place in Cedar Valley that can do what it does. … These people have grown to depend on El Centro. There's nothing else there for them."

The immediate future for El Centro is by no means determined, Cassis said. She still envisions being able to find more funding for 2006 and said the only service at issue is the two-hour a week radio program, which they've had to cancel. And this, she said, is not permanent; she intends to bring it back with other funding.

Contact Luke Jennett at (319) 291-1473 or ljennett@iastate.edu.