Grassroots Self-Sufficiency

Traditional approaches to alleviating poverty often include job training and education, then fail to get people into long-term employment. They are often expensive as well. But the Pacoima Urban Village is a low-tech, low-cost community effort to boost self-sufficiency by providing active job-hunting help along with community-based training.

“This gives people sustainable ways to fulfill their dreams rather than be dependent on services,” says social worker Dawn Weisz, the only member of the five-person Urban Village coordinating team not from the Pacoima low-income community.

All participants are asked to provide 30 hours of help to other participants.”This is not charity,” says coordinator Jorge Lara, a laid-off electrician. “People pay back with their time on a neighborhood cleanup, teaching English or giving child care to a neighbor who’s going to school.”

More than 400 residents have participated in Urban Village programs, including a career club that works with Mission College to provide training and a job club that screens community applicants for placement with employers including United Parcel Service. More than 70 participants have either come off the unemployment rolls or moved up to a better job. A program to teach young participants who may be tempted by gangs to renovate housing is being organized. There is also a separate beautification and safety group that cleans up graffiti and plants fruit trees.

The 18-month-old Urban Village effort, named for the African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child,” is an extension of the Vaughn Family Center, a collaboration between the Los Angeles Educational Partnership and United Way that offers social and health services to Vaughn elementary school students and their families. Organizational acumen is provided by volunteer Kay Inaba, a retired industrial psychologist. “The community is calling the shots,” says Inaba. “Instead of coming in with a program designed elsewhere, we asked them want they wanted and then went out to find training and funding to meet those needs.”

Urban Village has attracted global attention: First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton visited in February and a national charity is sending team member Yoland Trevino to Bombay, India, to share what’s been learned so far.

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ONE WOMAN’S EXPERIENCE

Luz Maria Munoz, a 38-year-old mother of three from Mexico, has been with Urban Village from its beginning in the fall of 1994.

Here’s how it has worked for her:

1. Connecting: Munoz, a homemaker, attends an Urban Village meeting at the school after one of her children brings home a flyer. She opts to help organize the career club. This means making up and passing out club flyers at school and phoning neighbors to attend planning sessions.

2. Back to school: Urban Village helps Munoz enroll in an office training program at Mission College, where she takes classes in English,bookkeeping and computer science. “I want to help my children do better in their classes and work as an administrator for a business,” she says. Urban Village helps arrange a $200 loan to help with child care.

3. Payback: Munoz coordinates career club members in a series of fund-raisers to help other neighbors who need loans for child care or transportation. They raise $500 by holding pizza parties and showing movies. “My children are proud of me,” Munoz says. “I have much more hope nowbecause PUV helped me see that the skills I use as a parent can translate into the business world with this added training, which they’re also helping me with.”

4. Job: The Mission College program has guaranteed her an office job on completion of her couse work this summer.

AN OBSERVER’S VIEW “We’re in serious discussions to fund Pacoima Urban Village because we see its strategy as advanced. We tend to “project-ize” a problem, putting up a homeless shelter or food bank. PUV remedies that isolated, fragmented approach by linking education and jobs, the environment and health, housing and economic development. And it’s community-driven and directed.”

--ELWOOD HOPKINS

Director, Los Angeles Urban Funders

TO GET INVOLVED: Call (818) 834-1485.

Researched by PATRICIA A. KONLEY / For The Times