Youths Get a Chance to Widen Worldview

By Fred Alvarez

Nov. 21, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Brenda Flores has heard all about the majesty of the Getty Center. But growing up in Ventura County’s isolated Santa Clara Valley, about 60 miles and a world away from the Los Angeles museum, the 15-year-old daughter of immigrant farmworkers figured a visit was out of the question.

Not anymore. As part of the Santa Paula-based At Home Anywhere project, Flores and dozens of other youths will be able to visit that museum and many others and share their experiences in the agricultural community.

The program seeks to broaden the worldview of school-age youngsters in this largely Latino community, where many are isolated by language, culture and geography.

Youths will visit such places as the Getty, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the Los Angeles Zoo. They will record their adventures on videotape to share at their schools, community events and the Santa Paula Family Resource Center, where the At Home Anywhere program is housed.

They also will visit museums and other cultural centers in their own community to draw parallels between the big-city venues and the resources in their own backyard.

“It’s about learning new things,” said Brenda, a straight-A student at Isbell Middle School in Santa Paula. “By having these experiences, we’ll be able to show other people, and hopefully they can learn from us.”

The program is run by Camarillo-based Interface Children Family Services, which received $10,000 this year from the Los Angeles Times Family Fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation. The foundation raises money for nonprofit groups serving disadvantaged children and youths in Los Angeles, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange counties.

The money was used to launch At Home Anywhere, one of a number of initiatives at the Santa Paula center aimed at promoting the health and well-being of youngsters in the Santa Clara Valley.

Lisa Chadwick-Peterson, community development specialist for Interface, said the primary goal was to get youths to connect with the world around them. She said the effort was especially important to children at the center, many of whom are the sons and daughters of immigrants and have never ventured beyond the confines of this citrus-growing valley.

“Some of these kids have never been to the beach, even though it’s only a few miles away,” Chadwick-Peterson said. “The goal is for kids to be exposed to something they have never been exposed to before, so that the outside world is not so big and not so scary.”

Project manager Veronica Vera-Vargas, who oversees the At Home program, said she can relate. She grew up in Oxnard and encountered the same kind of cultural and language isolation experienced by those in the program.

“Going to a museum was such a foreign concept,” she said of her own upbringing. “We want to give the kids the opportunity to be exposed to other places and then to come back and compare that to what they have here at home.”

Money raised last year has provided $1.4 million to help children in need in 2005.

The annual fundraising campaign is part of the Los Angeles Times Family Fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, which this year will match the first $500,000 in contributions at 50 cents on the dollar.

Donations are tax deductible. For more information, call (213) 237-5771. To make donations by credit card, go to latimes.com/holidaycampaign.

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