Wisconsin not-for-profit group Centro has secured a grant of nearly $3 million from Ascendium Education Group to build a tech hub intended to widen access to digital skills, job pathways, entrepreneurship, and leadership opportunities for Latine communities in Wisconsin and beyond. The Centro Tech Hub reflects a broader push to bring more underrepresented residents into the state’s technology economy.
According to Centro, the new hub will move forward in three stages: community-informed research, expansion of in-house training, and the creation of a bilingual online learning platform. That sequencing suggests an effort to build the program around local needs first, then scale delivery through tools that can reach more learners with fewer barriers.
Centro Hispano framed the hub as part of a larger effort to build stability and opportunity for Dane County’s Latine population. The organization describes itself as a long-standing bilingual and bicultural service provider in the region, with deep ties to Madison and surrounding communities, adding that it had tripled its staff and doubled the volume of programs offered over the last ten years.
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Ascendium, which funds education and training initiatives for learners from low-income backgrounds, said the investment is meant to expand opportunity through organizations that can create multiple pathways to success. The grant also comes amid a wider pattern of Ascendium backing student success and workforce development projects across higher education and regional innovation. Related announcements show the nonprofit supporting initiatives at NACUBO and, through a separate strategic effort, a community-college innovation program with the National Science Foundation and New America.
For Centro, the funding gives it a major platform to turn language access, training, and entrepreneurship support into a more formal tech-and-career pipeline for the local community.
“I crave a future where Latinx families are prioritized, mobilized by many faces of all kinds of backgrounds that says our thriving will only expand and certainly will not be jeopardized,” said Karen Menéndez Coller, executive director of Centro, in the statement.
