REACHING OUT: FICS’ Executive Director Alayne Unterberger (right) and family counseler Angelica Socias. Credit: Shanna Gillette

With just about every presidential candidate scrambling to prove he’s more immigrant-phobic than the next guy, it’s refreshing to spend time at a place where the focus is on helping immigrants, not punishing them.

The Multicultural Family Center in Town ‘N Country is such a place. On any given afternoon, children and teenagers, many of them Latino, many from families who have recently immigrated to the U.S., gather for after-school activities — once certain priorities are met.

“The first question I tell my staff to ask is ‘Hello, how was your day, do you have any homework?'” says Alayne Unterberger, executive director of the Florida Institute for Community Studies (FICS), which runs the center. That kind of individual attention is evident one recent evening, when Unterberger deals gently but firmly with a rambunctious group of elementary schoolers gathered in the computer lab. Later, drumming instructor Freddie Montes, the well-known Cuban musician, concludes a session with a few words on life. “It’s not about being a musician,” he sums up. “It’s about the discipline.”

FICS, a combination think tank and “community capacity-building organization,” was founded in 2002 by Unterberger and a group of like-minded visionaries who believed the best way to help a community in need is to listen to the people who live there. Under the leadership of Unterberger — a former bilingual social worker with a doctorate in anthropology — they based FICS on a three-pronged approach in which research, training and community outreach would inform each other.

A four-year $1 million federal grant laid the foundation for FICS’ main research and counseling program, Project Prevention, which combats HIV and substance abuse among Latino and multicultural youth at several locations in Hillsborough County. Unterberger has leveraged that funding to meet other, related needs of the Latino community, organizing an anti-violence roundtable, an annual Three Kings’ Day celebration, health careers expeditions and a Latino youth summit. And then there’s the family center, which opened in 2005 in a Town ‘N Country strip mall and recently expanded into a neighboring office space. All in all, the center is a living embodiment of the adage “think globally, act locally.”

“It’s hard not to be global when you’ve got the whole world sitting in your computer lab,” says Unterberger, whose agency serves families with a mix of Cuban, Colombian, Puerto Rican, Haitian, Dominican, African-American and even Thai backgrounds, to name a few.

But now the federal grant is about to run out. And this summer, the Hillsborough County Commission rejected FICS’ request for funding that would help replace the federal support.

In light of this potential crisis, there’s an urgency beneath FICS’ invitations to its 5th Anniversary Dinner Fundraiser; this year more than ever FICS needs financial aid. The dinner is scheduled for Dec. 6 at Lowry Park Zoo’s Paradise Café, and if the ebullient spirit of the family center carries over to the zoo, it should be quite a party. (There’s also an open house the next day at the center.)

Meanwhile, Unterberger and company are preparing for the future, like the center’s annual Three Kings’ Day party in January. And whatever happens, they see the positive results of their work every day. In Unterberger’s office, there’s a sheaf of letters written to the Hillsborough County Commission by parents and children in support of the funding request. Many of them refer to the center as a “second home,” including one from a student volunteer named Geovany Rojas. Before he came to the center, he says, he was stuck in “a life of drugs and crime.” Now he’s working for the center as a teen coordinator, and finishing his G.E.D.