Evangelical leaders joined DREAM Act-eligible youth in Florida this week to launch Nuestro Futuro, a campaign to work with church networks and youth leaders to bring Latino evangelical youth to the polls in 2012.

Nuestro Futuro ”will partner with hundreds of churches in six key states (Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona, New York and New Jersey) to register new voters and to educate the broader community on the top issues facing young Hispanic Evangelicals: poverty, immigration and education.”

“Latino and Latina evangelicals are close to 11 million people in the United States,” Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, said during a phone conference on Wednesday. “In the next several months, we will register Latino and Latina evangelicals [so] young Latinos and Latinas are not condemned to poverty based on their ZIP code.”

The National Latino Evangelical Coalition, a movement that advocates for “the common good and justice in the public sphere,” will focus its initial campaigns on poverty, immigration reform and educational equity.

Rev. Peter Vivaldi, a Florida representative from the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, said in a written statement:

We are honored to be launching Nuestro Futuro in central Florida and partnering with over 300 churches in Central Florida to begin a voter outreach campaign. As Latino Evangelicals, we are not here to elect a candidate we are here to advance a set of issues: poverty reduction, immigration reform and education equity. These issues are a top priority for us and we will not stop our work until they are squarely on the agendas of our political leaders.

Read the full story at the Colorado Independent