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Wednesday, Jul 23, 2008
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GROUPS THAT CHANGE COMMUNITIES
El Centro de la Raza
El Centro de la Raza
Roberto Maestas, executive director
Stella Ortega, director, Frances Martinez Community Service Center
2524 16th Avenue South
Seattle, Wash. 98144
(206) 329-7960
This is a hard-working, exemplary civil rights organization which operates a grass-roots multiple-service agency. It serves a special role in Seattle as the moral and cultural center for Seattle’s large Latino community, which is widely dispersed rather than being concentrated in a barrio. (It is important to note that although it has a special focus on the Latin Community it has been able to develop a multi-racial unity in both staff and participants).
Seattle’s Latino community grew rapidly, but almost invisibly, when farm mechanization eliminated many farm worker jobs in Washington State’s rich Yakima Valley and elsewhere in the west prompting many people to move from the no longer hospitable farm region to the Puget Sound cities.
The program started when Roberto Maestas and other community leaders, realizing that empowerment was the key to moving into the economic mainstream, sought to establish an English as a Second Language program in the abandoned Beacon Hill elementary school. When school officials ignored their requests, they simply occupied the large, three-story building on Oct. 11, 1972, and stayed there four months until the City Council agreed to lease it to them for $1 a year.
Over the years El Centro has developed an impressive variety of programs against very formidable odds.
The Frances Martinez Community Service Center offers employment counseling and placement; emergency services to assist with housing, food, clothing and transportation. La Cocina Popular, a soup kitchen and meal-preparation center that looks like a quality Mexican restaurant, feeds participants daily and also brings in money by providing a catering operation.
The Jose Marti Child Development Center, a bi-lingual and multi-cultural center for infants through school-age children, provides low-cost services to low-income families, including a Head Start program, and it also trains teachers and parents in bilingual, multicultural methods.
El Centro’s International Relations Department and Community Outreach not only raises money through the sale of art and craft items from all the Americas, but it also builds people-to-people relations through tours, speakers and workshops. Community University is offered free to people and focuses on the teachings of Martin Luther King.
El Centro de la Raza’s multicultural efforts continue through its coalition building and its programs. It rents space at low cost to progressive organizations ranging from the Seattle Midwifery Center to the Council on American-Soviet Relations and the Minority Executive Directors Coalition.
El Centro also has purchased and is renovating two HUD repossessed houses that will be targeted for people going through employment and job-training programs with the idea of easing their concerns about housing so they can devote full attention to education. Also a 14 unit, two million dollar apartment unit of mutual housing will be finished in late 1994.
And, demonstrating that they think effectively about small things as well as large, they’ve recently set up one of those truly creative, yet absurdly simple concepts: A small telephone bank, answered by volunteers, so people who are looking for jobs but don’t have home telephones can list a number where they can be reached with a message.
All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.
Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.
Send him E-mail.
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