V Encuentro Proceedings and Conclusions

172 | Proceedings and Conclusions of the V National Encuentro of Hispanic/Latino Ministry participants. If this proportion is representative of the parishes and groups that did not report, more than 28,000 young people participated in the reflection and mission sessions. After each of the first three sessions, participants were asked to form pairs to conduct missionary visits to people in the peripheries in their area. They were then instructed to report on those visits on their consultation forms, in which they identified whether they encountered a young person, an adult, or a family. Again, only 55% of the parishes/groups reported estimates or counts of the people visited, and about 95% of those gave numbers for young people, indicating that about 15% of the people encountered were adolescents or young adults. Assuming that these efforts paralleled those in non-reporting parishes and groups, nearly 32,000 young people were encountered in the missionary visits to the peripheries. For the sake of simplicity in reporting, the parish teams were not asked to separate or compare the responses of young people in their analysis. Everything that was heard from the young people— both the participants and those encountered in the missionary actions—was combined with the responses of the adults to generate the findings that were summarized first in the Parish Working Documents, then in the Diocesan and Regional documents. The Regional Working Documents are available at the V Encuentro website ( https://vencuentro.org/episcopal-regions/ ), and many of those insights have been summarized in these Proceedings and Conclusions , especially in the sections on the “Echoes of the Encounters in the Peripheries” (pp. 37-44) and the summaries for each of the 28 Ministerial Areas (pp. 83-152). Although reaching over 60,000 young people through the V Encuentro process is certainly a respectable achievement, the question remained whether or not the efforts were successful at reaching all segments of the young Hispanic population. The consultation forms did not record the place of birth or year of entry, either for the participants or for those they encountered, so their particular generation is unknown. What is clear is that the participants in the five sessions were mostly people who were very engaged in the life of the Church, and the people they vis- ited mostly were not, so in this regard the consultation likely included the sought diversity of experiences. In an effort to ensure adequate participation of 2 nd and 3 rd generation Latinos, the V Encuentro team established an early partnership with the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry (NFCYM) to engage diocesan directors and coordinators of youth ministry in the process. The response to that partnership was mixed—there were a few notable dioceses where the collab- oration worked beautifully, but in most there was some confusion about how to collaborate at the diocesan level and how to implement the process in adolescent groups with multicultural participants or where there were few Hispanics/Latinos. What is clear is that there were not many English-speaking youth groups that did the process, and overall most of the responses nation- wide were in Spanish. Appendix B