An unprecedented humanitarian crisis is unfolding in the southwest: A surge in gang violence in Central America, especially in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, has prompted the parents of thousands of children to send their kids to the U.S. border, often alone or with a “coyote,” or paid smuggler.
According to the Dallas Morning News, officials say that 52,000 such children and teenagers have already arrived this year, with an estimate of 120,000 to arrive in the next fiscal year. While politicians argue about the cause of the surge and what should be done, caring people in Texas are not waiting for federal action to step up to help the distressed mothers and kids.
Sister Norma Pimentel saw immigrant mothers and children drooping at the bus station in McAllen, Texas as they waited to travel to meet relatives in other parts of the U.S. Because there are more people than local immigration officials can handle, they are permitting the migrants to travel to meet relatives and then appear before an immigration court at that location. “They are dehydrated, they are totally drained, they just fall and they need attention,” Pimentel told Karla Barguiarena of ABC 13.
Sister Pimentel began to coordinate a massive relief effort. For the past two months, she’s led a group of volunteers in assisting people at the bus station. “They don’t know who to trust,” Sister Pimentel told the Catholic News Service. “They fear someone will take advantage of them.” The volunteers reassure them that they are not going to exploit or harm them, and help address their immediate needs.
She also contacted a local priest who agreed to allow her to use the parish center at Sacred Heart Church, near the bus depot, as headquarters. Sister Pimentel set up cots for the homeless immigrants, and began to manage and distribute the donations of clothes and food that are flooding in.
“The assistance centers are an immediate and temporary response to the need,” she told the Catholic News Service. “A long-term solution is needed.”
According to Dianne Solís of Dallas Morning News, volunteers are launching similar efforts in other parts of Texas. A Catholic Charities children’s shelter in Fort Worth is doubling its capacity and aiming to open more shelters soon, and the Dallas branch of Catholic Charities is working to coordinate relief services, as well as holding immigration law seminars for lawyers who want to volunteer to help the migrant kids.
If you want to help Sister Pimentel’s efforts, you can donate through Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley. Catholic Charities of Dallas has set up a crisis info page and is accepting donations too, as is Southwest Key, another nonprofit that is running shelters for the kids.
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Tag: the American West
A Nonprofit That Helps Vets Get Involved in Sustainable Agriculture
They’re heroes on the battlefield. But once they return home, our veterans face joblessness, depression, homelessness, and suicide.
In Washington state, Growing Veterans is trying to fight these grave problems through the simple act of bringing former service members together to farm. Chris Brown, the founder of the nonprofit, told Briana Gerdeman of The Woodinville Weekly that a veteran once told him, “It’s nice to be able to plant something in the ground that will explode into life rather than into destruction.”
Brown is a Marine Corps veteran born and raised in Woodinville, Washington. After finishing his service, he went to college and started volunteering with the Veterans Conservation Corps, a veteran training program that helps restore and protect Washington’s natural resources. During his time with the organization, he saw first hand how rocky veterans’ transition into civilian life can be. Many of those that Brown met were interested in sustainable agriculture, so after he graduated in 2012, Brown launched his nonprofit to help members of the armed forces and grow healthy produce at the same time.
Growing Veterans employs seven soldiers at its main farm and seven more at partner farms, relying on the help of more than a hundred volunteers total. The farm work gives veterans a chance to connect with fellow soldiers and other volunteers who may not have served in the military.
Of the veterans who participate, Brown told Gerdeman, “Some of them are really interested in becoming farmers. Others just want to get outside or get involved in their community.” He said they welcome the chance to be “a part of something bigger than themselves…it’s something we all kind of long for, but veterans especially, because you’ve been with this group for so long. So it can be really huge for them, and therapeutic.”
What happens with the food that Growing Veterans raises? It’s sold to the community through Growing Washington CSA, where people can sign up to purchase food boxes of local, chemical-free produce that comes with the added bonus of helping veterans.
MORE: From Field Hands to Farmers: This Program Helps Latino Immigrants Become Landowners
A Life of Service: This Couple Wants Every Latino to Achieve the American Dream
Seeing young people not get their fair shake day after day can have a lasting impact on someone.
That was certainly the case with Richard Farias, who began his career as an educational liaison in the Houston, Texas juvenile justice system and now most recently, founded the Houston-based nonprofit American Latino Center for Research, Education & Justice.
“I became much more empathetic,” Richard told Lindsay Peyton of the Houston Chronicle. “I saw my job as trying to help kids, instead of trying to catch them and lock them up. I have a lot more insights on how to help them with the day-to-day.”
Moving on from the justice system, he started one of the first charter schools in Texas in an effort to address the problems he saw. Later on, Richard became the executive director of an alternative high school that gave dropouts a second chance.
Houston Mayor Annise Parker awarded Richard a lifetime achievement award in 2011, but as the launch of his new nonprofit demonstrates, he’s not done helping people yet.
Now with the help of his wife Rita, Richard is seeking to transform Houston neighborhood by neighborhood to become a city that boosts its low-income Latino youth to success. While the Latino population in northwest Houston is growing, Richard told Peyton, “there’s minimal support services for Latinos and their children here.”
Using their knowledge and experience, the couple has already started helping families at a mobile home park in the area. Describing it, Rita said, “You wouldn’t even know it’s there, and the living conditions are terrible.” As they work to transform the neighborhood, they keep the goal of their nonprofit in mind: To enrich the lives of low-income communities through education, arts, justice, and economic opportunity.
While the Fariases are zeroing in on one neighborhood, their nonprofit is also focusing on the big picture — by organizing the Latino Education Summit at Rice University in August. “It will hopefully serve as a catalyst to affect changes at the state level,” Richard told Peyton.
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There’s More Than Meets the Eye to This Picnic in the Park
During the school year, lunch often isn’t a problem for low-income kids because they benefit from subsidized meals. But when summer rolls around, well, it’s another thing: Hunger becomes a real threat.
In Idaho, that situation is a bigger problem than you might realize. In fact, more than 90,000 kids experience hunger, according to the Idaho Foodbank.
The nonprofit doesn’t want these children to spend an entire summer with rumbling stomachs, so this year they are continuing their popular Picnic in the Park program — a massive effort to provide 60,000 meals to needy kids in the Boise area.
The initiative has 27 lunch giveaways planned for the summer— the majority of which will happen in public parks. During the noontime gatherings, Parks and Recreation Department employees and volunteers will be on hand to lead kids in exercise and games and the Idaho Commission for Libraries will bring bookmobiles to the events. The Idaho State Department of Education, the Boise School District, and Old Chicago Restaurant are also involved, contributing various things.
“I don’t know if there’s a better collaborative effort than this,” said Boise Mayor Dave Bieter told George Prentice of Boise Weekly. “Getting kids moving, reading, making good friends and developing healthy habits…this just gets better every year.”
Marty Zahn of Old Chicago explained to Prentice how the events work. “As the kids are eating their lunches, we begin some interactions…some small talk, asking them about their plans for the summer and whatnot. Then, it’s just natural to ask them to play some games.”
And after a nutritious lunch, the kids certainly have plenty of energy to play, read, and make friends.
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These Towns Show What Even Temporary Urban Renewal Can Bring
Have you ever passed by an uninspiring stretch of your city and thought, ‘What this place needs is a beer garden?’
The citizens of several cities in Colorado did, and now they’re taking urban renewal into their own hands, creating temporary spruce-ups of blighted areas to show what is possible — and perhaps inspire permanent changes in the future. In Golden, community members zeroed in on a couple of blocks of a street named Miners Alley. That particular stretch was just steps away from downtown, but the spaces weren’t being put to any inspiring use. As Colleen O’Connor writes for the Denver Post, the street is “mostly used for deliveries to businesses that front bustling Washington Avenue.” But during the first weekend of June, citizens threw a street party called Better Block Golden there.
The volunteer-run event featured a pop-up beer garden, bands, art projects for kids, new landscaping, a vibrant Aspen tree mural, café seating and plenty to eat and drink. “If we like it, we can start making some permanent changes,” Golden’s Mayor Marjorie Sloan told O’Connor.
The project was inspired by The Better Block, a website that tracks and encourages such local improvements to urban landscapes across the country and around the world. Elsewhere, Street Plans Collaborative, an urban planning firm, offers a free guide on how to pull off quick city transformations like “guerilla gardening” and “pavement-to-parks” on its website.
Several other Colorado cities are getting in on the block-improvement movement, including Colorado Springs, where the group Colorado Springs Urban Intervention is hanging signs pointing the way for pedestrians to find easy and safe urban places to walk. They also transformed an ill-used block into the site of Curbside Cuisine, a gathering of food trucks.
“We wanted to change the dialogue on Colorado Springs,” co-founder of Colorado Spring Urban Intervention John Olson told O’Connor. “Instead of dreaming about things, let’s do it. Stop the chatter, and show that it will work. We heard too many times that Colorado Springs isn’t Portland, and it won’t work. But it’s doing fantastic.”
So the next time you walk past a blighted block, don’t be surprised by the transformations yet to come.
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When a Veteran’s Wheels Stopped Turning, These Police Officers Got Him Moving Again
Pushing a non-functioning 300-pound motorized scooter an entire mile doesn’t sound like the easiest task. In fact, it sounds downright quite difficult.
Yet that’s just what some San Diego police officers did Memorial Day weekend.
Officers Eric Cooper and Milo Shields were out on patrol Sunday afternoon when they spotted a man on a scooter that had stopped working.
The stranded scooter driver, 67-year-old Gilbert Larocque, is a veteran disabled from injuries he sustained in combat as a door gunner in the Army during Vietnam. As a result, he relies on the vehicle to get wherever he needs to go.
Once the officers determined the scooter’s battery was dead, they considered driving Larocque to his home in the Hickman Field Trailer Park a mile away — but then he’d be stuck without his wheels.
So the officers decided to push Larocque home on his scooter, as you see in this video. “We thought it was going to be like pushing a shopping cart, but we were fighting against the transmission the whole time,” Cooper told Lyndsay Winkley of U-T San Diego.
“Being a veteran myself, I was gracious for his service to our country. The least I could do was push him,” Shields told Monica Garske of NBC San Diego.
“We think about veterans one day a year. We should think about them more,” Shields said.
Still, the officers are confident that it doesn’t take a cop to help out a citizen. “I have no doubt that other citizens of San Diego would have stepped in and done it if we had not,” Cooper said.
MORE: This Nonprofit is Making Sure Kids of Fallen Heroes Can Go To College
Texas Lawyers Provide Free Help to Young Undocumented Immigrants
Many young undocumented immigrants brought to America as kids live in a kind of suspended animation — with everything from college to jobs to medical care to driver’s licenses put on hold by their legal status.
Under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, such young adults can apply for temporary permission to work, go to school, all the while not worrying about being deported. DACA doesn’t provide a pathway to eventual citizenship as the DREAM Act would if it were ever to pass, but the policy still allows these youth to progress in their lives, go to college, and start careers.
Registering for DACA it isn’t easy, however. Applicants must be younger than 31 years of age (as of June 15). Plus, they must provide proof of continuous residency in the United States. Which could be a problem for some immigrants if they started working after high school and took a job that paid in cash because of their lack of a Social Security number — leaving a gap in their records.
That’s why a group of immigration attorneys in Texas will be offering free legal help to DACA-eligible people on June 5 and 6 at the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) in San Antonio.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, Texas has 210,000 immigrant residents eligible for DACA, the second highest of any state. (California has the most.) Immigration attorney Alex Garza of RAICES told Dana Choi of the Standard-Times in San Angelo that the nonprofit is trying to find and help as many of those people as it can. “We are actually coming out to the towns and counties so (people who might be eligible for DACA) don’t have to travel all the way out to San Antonio for legal assistance.”
Johana Deleón is one young Texan that RAICES helped apply for DACA; she was approved back in March. Now Deleón is studying for her driving test and was recently accepted into Texas A&M, where she will attend if she can find enough financial aid.
The challenges she faces as she continues her education are considerable, but she’s ready. “You can start at the bottom and work your way up,” she told Choi. “We work hard to get where we are, so I don’t think it’ll be much of a problem for us.”
MORE: No Longer Afraid: A Young Immigrant Victim of the Aurora Theater Shootings Steps Out of the Shadows
Meet a Veteran That Uses a 19th Century Art Form to Capture Today’s Soldiers
What do you know about tintypes? Chances are, probably not much. After all, it’s a photography technique that was popular during the Civil War, involving reactive chemicals, metal plates, and a large-format camera.
Photographer and former gunner on combat search-and-rescue helicopters Ed Drew took artistic inspiration from this old format, setting up photo sessions with his fellow soldiers, which he’d have to abandon whenever he was called out on a mission. Still, he had time to capture plenty of striking and evocative portraits.
“I like tintypes because it’s not just something simple…you have to set it up and you have to be really physical with it, you can’t just click,” he told Scott Shafer of the PBS NewsHour. “You’re basically making a photo on a piece of metal. You’re exposing it, developing it and fixing it all right then and there.”
When Drew learned that he would be deployed to Afghanistan last year, he packed his camera. According to Shafer, Drew’s tintypes were the first to be created in a combat zone since the Civil War, when families typically would use them to capture a final memory of a loved one before he went off to war.
Once Drew left the military, he struggled to find his purpose, eventually deciding to use his photography to show the beauty of people. Now he attends the San Francisco Art Institute and works with The Garden Project in San Bruno, California, with a program for at-risk youth. The Air Force veteran now makes tintypes of young people learning job skills through organic farming.
“I think the imperfections of tintypes is what I really enjoy,” Drew told Shafer, “and I think it’s a great analogy for life, life is not perfect whether they have a little speck on them or a little streak of silver that just kind of went awry, you accept the image just like you accept the person.”
MORE: How One Veteran Discovered the Healing Power of Art and Made it His Mission to Share With Others
When Jobs Are Tight, Immigrants Turn to Microbusiness Incubators
For many workers, the recent economic downturn either forced or inspired them to finally strike out and start the business that they’ve always dreamed of. And that is especially true for many immigrants who may lack education, English skills, or the dependable transportation they need to succeed in the traditional — and still tough — job market.
Paula Asuncion of Portland, Oregon is one such newly-minted entrepreneur. Asuncion immigrated from Mexico decades ago, and since then, held a variety of low-wage, fast-food and farm jobs to support her six children — a burden that grew more difficult after her husband’s death.
But two years ago, she started participating in a program sponsored by Hacienda CDC (Community Development Corporation), a Portland nonprofit that provides housing, education, and economic advancement help for Latinos. Hacienda CDC sponsored a microbusiness incubator that trained Asuncion and others on the ins-and-outs of entrepreneurship.
Now, Asuncion runs her own catering business and was able to buy a home rather than sharing a crowded apartment with other families as she used to.
Janet Hamada, the executive director of Next Door Inc., another Portland-area nonprofit that offers business training told Gosia Wozniacka of the Associated Press, “The biggest concern among immigrants is having stable work. They come to us and say, ‘I want to start a taco stand. How do I do that?'”
People like Asuncion and those who want to open taco stands, for instance, form a major part of the American economy. According to the Association for Enterprise Opportunity, microbusinesses with five or fewer workers employ 26 million Americans.
The nonprofit Adelante Mujeres in Forest Grove, Oregon, which offers a ten-week microbusiness class for Latinos, has seen a surge in interest from those who want to start their own businesses. Program director Eduardo Corona told Wozniacka,”Anti-immigration laws have led to people having a really hard time finding jobs, even on farms. Since they have to put food on the table, they’re starting to explore their abilities and thinking of opening a business.”
Interestingly, numerous studies have shown that immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to start their own businesses. One report found that more than half of Silicon Valley tech start-ups were founded by immigrants.
And now with the help of these increasingly popular nonprofit business incubators for low-income people, we’re likely to see even more successful immigrant entrepreneurs in every sector, from tacos to technology.
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Poverty Doesn’t Prevent These Kids From Having Fabulous Feet
While harried middle-class parents might worry about finding the time to chauffeur their kids to all their different after-school activities, low-income families have a different problem: They can’t afford these activities at all.
Dance lover Catherine Oppenheimer didn’t want to let money stand between kids and the chance to dance (which, with costumes, costumes, classes, contest entry fees, and shoes, is one of the most expensive pastimes).
Oppenheimer began her career as a professional dancer with the New York City Ballet. Her mentor there, Jacques d’Amboise, not only led the company in performing, but he also established the National Dance Institute in New York to give inner-city kids a chance to dance. When Oppenheimer retired from performing, d’Ambroise encouraged her to bring such a program to another group of needy kids in New Mexico.
So two decades ago, Oppenheimer went and founded the National Dance Institute of New Mexico (NDI). Last year, the program taught dance to 8,000 kids in 80 public schools in the southwest state, according to the PBS NewsHour. It costs $5 million to run the organization, but fundraising covers the bulk of that so the majority classes are free, including in-school instruction for fourth and fifth graders and after school classes for preschoolers and older dancers.
The program culminates in a big show that gives the kids a chance to shine, such as one that recently featured 500 dancers in the Santa Fe school district, as well as some of their parents and a group of local firefighters.
In a 2013 study that measured the health and well-being of American students, New Mexico ranked last among all states. But an independent study found that kids participating in NDI raised their grades in science and math and improved their physical fitness.
Sixteen-year-old Emery Chacon, who has been dancing with NDI since fourth grade, believes dance has made a difference in his life. “Yes, my grades before, they were moderate, from C’s to — like C’s and D’s, but now, actually, with NDI, it’s actually improved to B’s and A’s in most of my classes,” he told Kathleen McCleery of the PBS NewsHour.
Through the years, NDI New Mexico has produced a few professional dancers. But more importantly, it’s created many more dedicated students who continue to perform the right steps toward a promising future.
MORE: Music Can Change A Troubled Kids’ Life. Here’s The Proof.
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