On one side are printed simple phrases: "Good Morning," "Welcome to the Women's Center," and "Please wait a minute." On the other side are the Spanish translations.

Among them, maybe most important, is this one: "Lo siento, no hablo espanol" -- "I'm sorry, I don't speak Spanish."

In the past year, The Women's Center has lost both of its bilingual employees, Executive Director Ann Gerhardt said. Now, Spanish-speaking callers or visitors wait while receptionists scramble to find one of two employees who can speak some Spanish.

Sometimes, the agency has to simply turn people away, as it did last weekend when no one was there to translate a home-buying seminar for two of the attendees who couldn't speak English.

Nonprofits struggling to serve the area's growing Hispanic population say that finding bilingual employees is a major obstacle. Hampered by salaries that can't compete with those offered by for-profit companies or bigger nonprofits, and faced with an applicant pool lacking in people who are both bilingual and licensed in their fields, many nonprofits have been unable to keep up with the needs of Spanish-speaking clients.

"The social service system has just been overwhelmed with the need, and I think everybody is responding the best they can," said Rick Miller-Haraway, director of Catholic Charities' Raleigh regional office.

According to 2005 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, about 8 percent of Triangle residents are Hispanic.

Miller-Haraway said about 30 percent of his office's clients must receive services in a language other than English. Six of the office's 21 employees speak both English and Spanish. Miller said it's not only more difficult to find bilingual employees, but it's harder to keep them, too.

"The director of our Hispanic Family Center has been with us for 10 years, but she probably gets a call a month with other job offers," Miller-Haraway said. "So I'm very good to her."

Job openings requiring a master's degree or a professional license can be particularly hard to fill.

"The Spanish-speaking population in North Carolina is first-generation, foreign-born and, by and large, often monolingual," said Martha Olaya-Crowley, director of project management and development for Wake County Human Services. "We don't have, like other states have, second- and third-generation bilingual professional graduates of our universities to meet the desired qualifications for certain professions."

Several years ago, a group of Wake County nonprofits and government agencies developed a plan to create an organization that could work for three to five years on recruiting bilingual employees.

The organization, Olaya-Crowley said, would have served other local nonprofits in need of Spanish-speaking employees -- for example, by building relationships with universities in Hispanic countries or in states with large, more established Hispanic populations. The groups applied for grants to pay for the project, but couldn't find a funder.

Olaya-Crowley, a native of Colombia, said local agencies don't always have experience in shifting recruiting strategies, like advertising out of state or in Spanish-language publications. Agencies without any Spanish-speaking staff members might also lack the ability to test the Spanish skills of bilingual applicants.

"We have a very desirable state to live in, and the business sector is able to recruit people they need," Olaya-Crowley said. "But when it comes to other areas, like teachers or health professional specialists, I think we find ourselves ill-equipped to hire people because we have to go out of state and we don't know how to do that."

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