La Familia Keynote - It Takes A Village

Thank you to La Familia for hosting this event. My work is primarily in San Francisco’s Mission District, so it’s good to be in community with my inspiring colleagues on the other side of the Bay. We’re all in this together. La Familia, Street Level Health Project, Resilient Fruitvale, Mission Economic Development Agency, and others, we have all done heroic work, both before and during the pandemic. We’ve done this by addressing the massive inequities in our community, but also by tapping into the power of our community, our place. It’s heroic work, but we shouldn’t have to be heroes. The community capacity, the community magic, that we channel, should be fully funded and part of an ongoing racial justice strategy for both the Bay Area and the country. It’s good government, and it’s the human thing to do.?Before I get into that, let me share what brought me to this work.

I’m a fourth generation Bay Area native. My great grandparents were Yaqui, the indigenous people that lived in Northern Mexico, in and around the Arizona border, since time immemorial. And the Yaqui people continue to live there, despite centuries of persecution and attempted genocide, and shifting borders imposed by European colonists. My great grandparents, after fighting in the Mexican Revolution, were part of the great post-Revolution migration to California to escape the devastation of war. They settled in East San Jose more than a hundred years ago, and their children became farmworkers in what was then called the Valley of the Heart’s delight. As children, my parents worked in the fields alongside adults during the summer, and during the school year they were punished for speaking Spanish in class. They came of age during the Chicano movement, adopted the cholo style, and marched with Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez for equal rights. But neither of them graduated from high school, and as teenage parents, their marriage didn’t last long.?

My mother, my little brother and I lived in poverty. We were homeless at times, and sometimes we had to sleep in our car in downtown San Jose. We moved around so much that I ended up dropping out of school, just like my parents. One day my mom, who is a brave woman who always challenged norms and expectations for women, and who committed herself to life-long reading and learning, went to a community college to get a 6-month certificate to become an office clerk. After she took the diagnostic test, the counselor told her her scores were so high that she should instead complete the two-year program and transfer to a four-year university. I think she was more happy for me than she was for herself. She came home and told me I still had a chance to go to college. Neither of us had known about this second chance opportunity. We ended up going to community college at the same time. She transferred to UC Santa Cruz, and I transferred to UC Berkeley.

From that moment on, I dedicated my life to making sure our society became more fair, more just, and that more people from my community, people like my mom and me, didn’t fall through the cracks, that they had what they needed to succeed and to take their rightful place in society as equal and contributing members.?

I spent the first ten years of my career in government. I was disheartened by the slow nature of bureaucracy, by how removed it seemed from the community I came from – the community it was supposed to be serving. I didn’t like the silos in government that prevented agencies from working collaboratively. I was also turned off by the lack of accountability. We seemed to be spending a lot of money, but not working toward measurable results. I also didn’t see a transformative vision for ending poverty.?

So, like many of you, I joined the nonprofit sector, and although it’s called nonprofit, it ended up being very profitable for my spirit at least. I landed in the Mission District, one of the epicenters for Latino culture in the Bay Area, but also one of the epicenters for income inequality and displacement.?

I’m sure all of you have been to the Mission District. The home of Carlos Santana, Galeria de La Raza, Balmey Alley, the Dia De Los Muertos procession, and the Bay’s Carnaval celebration. There is magic in place. The Mission is a neighborhood of more than 50,000 people, packed into 1.5 square miles. This density only adds to the vibrancy of the community, and is part of what makes it so attractive to higher income earners. The Mission has traditionally been a working-class, gateway community for Latino immigrants. But beginning with the Dot Com Boom, we saw more than a third of the Latino population displaced from the neighborhood – that’s 10,000 Latinos. Latinos used to be the majority of the community, but no longer.?

Ten years ago, our community responded collectively. The Mission District was facing exorbitant housing prices, families working multiple low-wage service sector jobs just to afford monthly rent, high levels of trauma stemming from immigration status and inability to be home with children because of work, and disparities in educational outcomes for Latinos. Because of this, my organization, the Mission Economic Development Agency, or MEDA, competed for, and won, a grant from the federal Department of Education to become one of about a dozen cities to create a Promise Neighborhood. Inspired by the Harlem Children’s Zone, we believed that our children had the ability to succeed in school given the right supports along the cradle to career continuum, and we made a promise that we would help bring the community together to provide those supports.

This type of support is what my mom and I needed so many years ago. And this type of large-scale, community-led project was exactly why I got into this work.

With our $30 million, five year grant, we formed Mission Promise Neighborhood, and became the quarterback for a team of 15 community organizations in the Mission, providing a seamless web of support for low-income families. We did so by bringing together and fully coordinating early learning centers, community health clinics, the school district, and the city. We sub-granted much of the funding to our community partners to create a common agenda, an electronic referral tool, data sharing agreements, and a results-based accountability plan, or RBA plan.

We also created parent leadership academies, to tap into community wisdom. It was the neighborhood parents who told us that the number one way that their kids would do better in school would be to have affordable, stable housing. It was parents’ voice that pressured the city into creating innovative new affordable housing programs, which allowed us to eventually go from being a service provider to also an affordable housing developer with more than 1,400 units built or in the pipeline.

We connected students and their families to affordable housing, mental health services, tenants rights, job training, small business loans, tax assistance, and more. For example, we helped families secure $5M in tax refunds in the last year alone. Over the years, we helped families complete 26,000 affordable housing applications, and eventually saw the kinder-readiness rate increase to 71%, compared to the neighborhood average of 41%, the graduation rate increase to 86%, from a starting point of 68%, and the rate of families with a medical home increased to 80%, from a starting point of 60%.

When COVID first arrived, it hit our community the hardest. Although Latinos only made up 15% of the city’s population, they were 50% of the COVID-positive cases, because of their crowded living conditions and service sector jobs that could not be done from home. The trust that our Promise Neighborhood built with the community, and the networked approach we had developed with other agencies, put us in a position to reach these families, and to work with the city to play a central role in distributing emergency resources to these hard-to-reach families, including $8M in income replacement funds to 6,000 families, allowing residents to quarantine at home when needed – and $9M in relief funds for nearly 300 small business owners.????

We came together as a community – a village – to provide for our neighbors who were in greatest need. I know that many of your organizations did the same. And the city, and philanthropy, needed us to get it done. Together, we built a new muscle, a collaboration muscle, and created fast, effective systems connecting philanthropy, government, and community. This muscle should not go away even if the pandemic subsides, because income inequality and systemic racism will still be here.?

When a community backbone agency coordinates government investments and partner collaboration, channels the voice of residents, and shows measurable results, this is good government. It’s community-driven, collaborative, data-informed, and accountable. It’s actually more than good government, it’s also called being a good human, when we help our neighbors.

These types of highly funded community backbone agencies, like Mission Promise Neighborhood, should not be boutique projects for a few lucky neighborhoods. They should be normalized. Government must evolve to be more connected to community – using community backbone agencies as conduits, connectors, and drivers of programming and policy,? and not just in times of crisis.?This type of capacity building and catalytic investment especially makes sense in communities of color with a legacy of discrimination, like redlining and other forms of systemic racism.??

Elected officials must show leadership to make this happen. Obama did it when he created Promise Neighborhoods. I’m not sure that bureaucrats have the power to develop such things. I think it requires elected officials.? I think that locally, Assemblymember Bonta is taking a policy leap similar to Obama with her It Takes A Village Act, AB 2517. It would dedicate more than $90 million in the state budget to fund Promise Neighborhoods or similar place-based efforts across California. My organization helped to draft this legislation in coalition with Hayward Promise Neighborhood, End Child Poverty in California, StriveTogether, and more.??

The It Takes a Village Act will institutionalize this type of community-led approach so that it is not limited to a few lucky neighborhoods, but scaled to reach more of our hardest hit communities. This new wave of Promise Neighborhoods and place-based initiatives could be the vanguard for a truly equitable recovery. Like the intro video said, we’re Californians, we lead.

But I’m not here to convince you to get behind a certain piece of legislation. A community led recovery is bigger than one piece of legislation, or one leader. It’s a change in mindsets. It’s a paradigm shift. As Jennifer Ellis said earlier, this is a movement. You and I -- we who are in place-based work, -- already know this, and now is the time for us to build on our momentum, to build on the fact that government and philanthropy have now seen how essential we and our residents are to a functioning, fair society, and they have seen how large scale, transformative investments can be part of a racial justice strategy in community with legacies of inequity. These types of investments are the right thing to do. They are the human thing to do. Thank you for listening to me, and more importantly, thank you for all of the powerful work that you do in our communities. It is an honor to work alongside you.

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