Grass-Roots Effort Helps Residents to Help Themselves

In a bungalow on the far end of campus at the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, 17 Latino women are involved in an intense discussion on the best ways to communicate with and discipline their children.

Later, in the same room, a group of young black and Latino youths takes part in a weekly discussion on how to offer gang members alternatives to hanging out on the streets.

Next door, volunteers and staff members are busy working on computers, scheduling events for neighborhood children and strategizing about ways to get more people involved in improving the community.

Welcome to the Pacoima Urban Village; grass-roots organizing in its purest form.

At a time when people are grappling to find assistance from oftentimes scarce resource centers and are becoming frustrated in seeking ways to improve their lives, the Pacoima Urban Village is a paradigm in self-organization and self-improvement.

Here, residents tackle poverty in all forms--its impact on communities, families and individuals. And according to village philosophy, each individual can play a part in the battle, and each is crucial to rebuilding and repairing lives and communities.

“We want to help people realize their worth more than they are realizing it now,” said village volunteer Kay Inaba.

“We want to completely transform this community, beginning with personal transformation on the responsibility we have to each other,” said Yoland Trevino, who serves as director of the village and the nearby Vaughn Family Center.

“We work to release the strength and skills that impoverished communities don’t realize they have,” she said. “People do strategic thinking in their daily lives. When you think about how a family survives with $50 a week, isn’t that budgeting?”

Most everyone involved with the village lives in the neighborhood. And if anyone in the community is helped by the village in any way, he or she is obliged to give back by planting trees in the neighborhood, providing day care for another family or attending classes in English as a second language.

The village operates career and job clubs. The career club, which meets every Thursday, works with participants to find out what jobs they would be best suited for and how to get a foot in the door.

Counselors from Mission College coach participants and encourage them to earn college degrees.

The job club works as a referral service, screening residents for employment.

“We don’t want to convert people, but we want to let people convert and improve themselves,” Inaba said. “That’s how we breed success.”

Part of having residents realize their potential is involving them in various activities, including computer and parenting classes as well as working to beautify Pacoima.

After a two-hour parenting class one recent Monday, Maria Carranza emerged more confident about handling her three children, ages 10, 6 and 1 1/2. But mostly she knows more about dealing with her oldest child, Jensy.

“Before these classes, I had trouble making my daughter clean her room or to set down rules for her,” Carranza, 31, of San Fernando, said in Spanish. “Thanks to these classes, I’ve learned to try, organize and give love.”

She rattles the words off a mental checklist she has developed since early May when the seven-week classes began. “This has helped me a lot.”

Nearly a year old, the village is an extension of the 5-year-old Vaughn Family Center, which has evolved from a loose-knit group of parents who organized to deal with school issues to a vital resource in the community. The center has become a national model for community renewal.

It uses a comprehensive approach to reach the community, offering health and dental care, parent education, child care, job-training counseling and many other services to the residents of Pacoima. And it has played a critical role in transforming the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center to help educate parents.

The Pacoima Urban Village is branching out with those efforts, involving more schools and neighborhoods in its definition of “community.” The village is now working with Pacoima, Telfair and Montague elementary schools as well as Maclay primary and middle schools. All have agreed to work together on issues ranging from education to health care.

“Eventually, we’d like the Pacoima Urban Village to become the umbrella group of the Vaughn Family Center,” said Jorge Lara, one of the original parents involved in the inception of the family center and now an assistant with the urban village.

“I really believe that the grass-roots leadership that involves the people who are affected is going to make the most sustaining improvements with people’s lives,” said Lara, who is well versed in fund-raising and school policies, and is fluent in English because of his work with the family center.

Trevino said the overall goal is for residents in the community--the real experts in life there--to determine their needs and the best ways to fill them.

Those concepts are familiar to Inaba, whose background is in total quality management.

“There are certain principles underlying total quality management that have to do with treating the people you work with as a customer, bringing the decision-making process down to the working level, emphasizing the value of team work,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what you call them. The principles are related to helping people release their capability.”

Inaba’s job is to help find the resources to enable the village carry out its goals. He is modeling his effort on Banana Kelly, a South Bronx-based organization.

The New York group is helping to train ex-gang members from the Valley to refurbish abandoned houses and to develop business skills so they can return to put their abilities to work in their own community.

“They started out with a bunch of abandoned tenements. Today they are a multimillion-dollar [organization],” Inaba said of Banana Kelly’s success.

Inaba figures it will take years before the village is financially viable enough to own businesses and operate housing programs. But already members are at work on issues that affect their lives.

Converting junior high schools to middle schools--which would send ninth-graders to high school campuses--is one issue that has angered many parents, who say they are concerned about gangs and their impact on younger students.

“We put together a village team to see how we can work with LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District] to resolve the problem,” Inaba said.

Lara remembers when things in his neighborhood were different, when he and others felt powerless to bring about change.

“I’ve been seeing a lot of beautiful changes,” he said. “I think we’re on the right track. There’s no doubt about it.”