Pitching In Pays Off for Oxnard Youths

When at the beach, kids from Oxnard City Corps repaired mesh fences that keep sand away from homes; when downtown they cleaned trash from city-owned lots, and at Food Share they packed groceries for the county’s needy.

And that was just in the morning.

Because of such hard work for nearly six years, El Concilio del Condado de Ventura will give the group its Youth Leadership Award 2001 as part of the organization’s 12th annual Latino Leadership Awards.

El Concilio, a nonprofit advocacy organization serving the county’s Latino community, will present the award and six others at a dinner Feb. 17.

Other winners include Oxnard residents Leo and Marilyn Valenzuela for their work with the county’s labor community and Ventura restaurant owners Aurelio Jauregui and Martha Hernandez-Jauregui for their leadership in business.

Both couples donate time to fund-raisers and community projects and encourage other residents to do the same, said Hank Lacayo, El Concilio’s board president.

Cellist Giovanna Moraga, a graduate student at UCLA who until recently lived in Oxnard, will be honored in cultural arts, and Oxnard School District Supt. Richard Duarte will receive the leadership award for education.

Santa Paula resident Jesse Ornelas will be honored for his community service, including helping to register thousands of voters over the past 25 years, and Ventura resident Dr. Manuel Marquez will receive the health care leadership award for his work with low-income residents of the county’s Spanish-speaking community and with HIV patients.

The recipients were nominated by county residents, Lacayo said. El Concilio’s board then selected the winners.

Since 1995, City Corps participants, ages 14 to 22, have quietly left their mark on Oxnard with more than 800 public service projects. A few members get paid, most are volunteers.

The youths, many of whom were considered “at-risk” of delinquency before joining City Corps, paint over walls in graffiti-covered alleys, build playgrounds, even clean the bathrooms and rehearsal halls of the Channel Islands Ballet Company in exchange for all the performance tickets they want.

Many take skills they learn in public service to find permanent jobs.

Oxnard founded City Corps as a youth program that city leaders hoped could eventually be weaned off government grants, said Efren Gorre, City Corps’ program manager. Other youth programs the city developed flourished, he said, as long as they received state funding. But once that money dried up, so did the programs.

City Corps, in contrast, was designed to be self-sustaining, Gorre said. For now it still relies on grants for most of its $150,000 annual budget, but Gorre expects that to gradually change as more of the organizations that City Corps helps begin to support the group financially.

The program also has a low overhead. Its headquarters in an Oxnard commercial building is rent-free in exchange for keeping that section of downtown clean.

“To quote one of the group’s founders, ‘Let’s found a program that will never be de-funded, because it will rely on the energy of the kids in town,’ ” Gorre said.

Toward that end, the corps’ 64 members have dozens of projects in the works at any given time. They set up and take down gear for festivals in Plaza Park. At Ormond Beach, members build fencing around the nests of endangered bird species; they set up equipment for a senior citizens’ exercise class; and operate the cameras for Oxnard City Council meetings.

And then there are those ballet tickets, which Gorre said are popular.

“You have tough-looking kids in the second row of a ballet performance, it’s quite a sight,” he said.

While designed largely as a program to give at-risk youths structured activities while out of school, the program has attracted youth from all parts of the community, Gorre said. Older members are selected as “team leaders” who direct small groups of City Corps kids on each project.

“Everything I’ve wanted in the corps I’ve achieved,” said 21-year-old Jesus Navarro, a team leader who has been with the program almost since its inception. “Leadership, recognition, the contacts you meet--it’s been a wonderful ride.”