Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:02 <inaudible>
Speaker 1 00:00:13 Welcome to the California table. I'm Betty Yee. We will be meeting people from our diverse regions of California who are creating their own tables to tackle some of the most pressing issues of our time, community voices gathering, coming together to speak up for themselves, to take charge of their own lives, to fight for themselves. This is the California table.
Speaker 0 00:00:40 <inaudible>
Speaker 1 00:00:53 Widening income. Inequality has been decades in the making in California. Over more than four decades. We have seen productivity grow exponentially while wages have stagnated, no stranger to cyclical economic downturns California's diverse sectors have weathered these events, however, especially including the great recession of 2008 low income families recovered more slowly with respect to their earnings. This disparity is exacerbated by the current economic recession induced by the COVID 19 pandemic earnings for many low income families and not returned to levels prior to the 2008 great recession. When the COVID public health emergency struck for these families, the current COVID crisis and recession have magnified their daily life challenges, shelter in place, directives amid growing housing and stability increased chances of Corona virus exposure with lack of access to affordable healthcare and the need to work and essential jobs, food and security with the loss of employment and increased debt from one community to the next.
Speaker 1 00:02:14 We have seen teen centers converted to food pantries and increase in mobile pantry deliveries and resident run pantries. Keep up with demand for food from families. Indeed. It was recently reported that one in eight California households are behind in paying their water bills. The amount of which has accumulated to a total of $1 billion, black and Latino households owe larger water debt amounts reflective of the untenable, juggling of priorities by those in communities where the pandemic has struck the hardest with our low income and minority neighbors shouldering a greater burden of these needs and necessities, community organizations throughout California are all hands on deck trying to keep pace with assistance, sacred heart community service. And San Jose is one of these organizations at a time when these organizations depend more on the service of their volunteers, the COVID crisis has required cutting back. Volunteers placing additional responsibilities on staff members, Latinos in California comprise 39% of the population yet account for 56% of the COVID cases and 48% of COVID deaths in light of this disproportionate impact organizations placed greater Alliance on prominent Doris. They Salude for community outreach and education.
Speaker 2 00:03:56 <inaudible>
Speaker 1 00:04:06 Joining me today on the California table is poncho Vara, who is the executive director of sacred heart community service. Welcome poncho.
Speaker 2 00:04:16 Thank you, Betty. It's a pleasure to be with you today.
Speaker 1 00:04:18 Thank you. Now you are the executive director of sacred heart community service, which is one of more than a thousand community action agencies that were established back in 1964 as part of an anti-poverty initiative, economic opportunity act. And, um, wanted to just see if you could tell us the services that sacred heart community service provides to the community.
Speaker 2 00:04:40 Thank you, Barry. I really appreciate it. Sacred heart community service was actually founded in 1964 by a woman who was responding to urgent need in her neighborhood in downtown San Jose. And we listed for over 40 years as a kind of a grassroots response to poverty in the heart of Silicon Valley. But about 10 years ago, we became a community action agency. One of the organization that was serving our community. And so we were chosen by the state of California in fact, to be the new community, actually a diverse Clara County, which is really quite an honor, but really what we decided to do at that point, which really expands what we were doing as an organization to go beyond providing things like food and clothing and financial assistance to families. And we were providing things like education program and employment support programs, but to really think differently about how we approach addressing poverty by reconciling the fact that the reason that people are poor is because our society lets it happened because there was awareness or commitment to try to deal with the root causes of it.
Speaker 2 00:05:39 And so we decided to add and grow our work in terms of engaging our community and bringing people into the advocates on behalf of the poor and also to be organizing a directly impacted community. So grassroots organizing became a huge component of what we were doing. So if you fast forward to today, we serve roughly anywhere between 55 and 65,000 individuals a year with the support of anywhere between five and 10,000 individuals a year that are helping us through volunteer support, and also folks that are involved in organizing for systemic change. So the kind of the range of resources includes everything from the thing that I mentioned before running one of the largest food pantries in Northern California, but also doing programs that are helping to engage people that are actually out there communicating with their community about how they can better support each other.
Speaker 2 00:06:25 And one's creating mutual support systems with each other, responding to situations in their neighborhoods and our lives and responding to systems and a variety of different ways. We did things like the ones I mentioned, but also do the gardening program that this is really just a network of people that are working on creating and building community responses to making sure that people are handling situations in our lives, just in terms of the economic dislocations and the high cost of living in an area like this. And then especially during COVID credit was kind of support systems where folks are really challenged to address these needs. And over the last year, especially during the pandemic, we've actually scaled up as we've done at other points to actually provide large-scale financial assistance, not just in terms of our community locally, but also partnering up with other organizations. We are the facilitator of a homelessness prevention system in Santa Clara County that we've been developing over the last few years that came out of the grassroots organizing work that we were doing, where families are saying, what, you know, what are we doing to prevent damage, being pushed into homelessness by the high cost of living.
Speaker 2 00:07:27 And so that homelessness prevention system and our partners with destination home, which is a public private partnership. And basically we're able to scale up a COVID relief program that has touched literally tens of thousands of lives and helped provide the tens of millions and financial relief, but really the big story about where sacred heart is and what we do as an organization is really responding to the needs of the community. By getting people involved by having volunteers have directly impacted individuals. We refer to all of our constituents as members and creating a place in a space for our membership to actually come together, um, define how we want to do our work and identify priorities. And then people directly involved in delivering services, um, organizing for, you know, for policy change primarily at a local level and then encouraging others to get involved. And more recently we've been involved in helping to create these networks of other organizations that are working hand and glove to try and make sure that we're responding in a thoughtful way to those circumstances in people's lives.
Speaker 1 00:08:30 That's a tremendous amount of responsibility. And I know particularly during this COVID crisis, just working smarter in partnership and certainly doing everything possible to be sure that no communities are left behind and in many ways sacred heart community service is the safety net that people are depending on. And we'll talk a little bit more in a moment about the COVID crisis specifically, but you're located in the heart of Silicon Valley. And I think what is lost is there is a perception that there is tremendous wealth in the Silicon Valley. And yet we know that, you know, for the better part of over four decades, we've seen, you know, real wages, not really experiencing any type of meaningful increase. In fact, they've declined and remained stagnant by and large. And certainly the disparities that result because of that. What has been your experience with respect to the communities that you serve? Where are they working? What are the demographics of the communities that you're serving in the Silicon Valley?
Speaker 2 00:09:26 Oh, that's a really good question. The economic inequality and the social disparities that exist are really, really pernicious and in place as wealthy. And in some ways you could say really powerful as Silicon Valley. I've also bought our reception area of our main facility as being kind of like something like the emergency room for poverty in this region, because you actually see people that are coming from all different backgrounds and ethnicities and lots of life actually kind of coming together and binding and experiencing each other in a different instructing ways. The vast majority of the families that we serve or happened to be immigrant working poor families, mostly on Latin X household that are, you know, working in trying to scrape by and be able to make things work. And that's about two thirds of the population, but we see increasing numbers of the last few years of Asian American and Asian American seniors, despite our relatively small numbers of African-Americans that lived in our community that make up roughly twice, the population of the larger community are actually represented in the numbers that are actually coming to us.
Speaker 2 00:10:22 And these situations are really an experience of what you're actually seeing economic inequality in the Valley, where you have a lot of working poor folks that are trying to make ends meet. They're working in service industries, construction, and many immigrants who are doing what they can to kind of contribute in the, the economy in different ways. Often a lot of undocumented workers, but being able to do what they can to try to survive and thrive and struggle. And sometimes they need some additional kind of help or support. So the reality is for most of the families that are coming to us for resources are really folks that are able to stretch those resources. And they're very resilient. You're strong and very resourceful. And every once in a while, they need to have a little bit of help or support to keep them moving and keep their families strong, um, and continue to succeed.
Speaker 2 00:11:08 But every once in a while they need some help and resources. But about a quarter of the folks that are actually coming to us are individuals that have actually experienced the worst dislocations. And they're living outside with the number of unhoused individuals that are, there is still a relatively small percentage of our overall picture of folks that are really, really struggling in this economy. And they've had to, you know, try to find other ways to make ends meet so that there are really important constituency that we're working with. That's certainly not the majority. So kind of painting the picture of what we see right now is really a amalgam of so many folks that are actually coming to us. And many of them come just a handful of times a year. Some of them really need some deeper kind of interventions and we've been able to work with them to craft the different types of solutions to support them day in, day out. But it can't really happen without the universe of volunteers that are coming and, and you know, other individuals that are coming to actually take time out of their lives, put some of their time and energy behind trying to improve the lives of their brothers and sisters in the community. And it's been a really rewarding part of our work and our core idea of what makes us function as an organization that we're a representation of people wanting to make lives better for each other.
Speaker 1 00:12:18 So really going back to that core purpose of the founding of sacred heart community service neighbor, helping neighbor
Speaker 2 00:12:25 Yeah. And understanding our privilege, the pros that many of us have sometimes I think about how segregated we are as a society where we really aren't in relationship with other people that are outside of our traditional boundaries. We all end up in our little bubbles setting aside, let me think couples right now, in terms of COVID, there's, there've been these bubbles that we kind of create around ourselves. Like we're really not in a relationship with people that come from different backgrounds or classes, and that's been true throughout our society. You may see them taking care of our families and our children, but are we really in relationship with those folks? And do we have any sense of what their lives are like or the challenges they are, the kind of overcrowding that they experience. And they are sometimes living in overcrowded conditions, they don't have the same access to kind of basic things. And that's been the kind of the exciting part, the most challenging part and rewarding part of this organization is seeing people step up and get to know other people and create these kinds of relationships across these boundaries of race and class and national origin, and being able to find that kind of connection and solidarity with each other that just inspires so many great things to happen. And so many great collisions that we normally don't see in our daily lives.
Speaker 1 00:13:32 Yeah. Well, I, you know, during this COVID pandemic, especially where we know that each of us is essential to the other, I think certainly understanding those who are different from us as this is a great opportunity to do that. I do want to pivot, we've talked about the economic disparity in the region. So you overlay the COVID crisis on top of that. And you look at the number of coronavirus cases and they certainly highlight the disproportionate impacts of the virus on the Latin X community. And there's been a great deal of media coverage about the prominence of chronic health conditions, such as hypertension and adverse environmental factors, such as living in areas with poor air quality as contributing factors to the high number of cases affecting the Latin X community. And yet few, very few media outlets delve into the causes of these conditions and how they are for the Latin X community.
Speaker 1 00:14:24 And so I wanted to just kind of just go into each of these areas because I'm particularly focused on healthcare. Um, everyone's focused on healthcare now in terms of the public health directives under of this pandemic, but how has the community been educated about the coronavirus and more importantly, where do they get information about things like public health directives of masking and social distancing and frequent hand-washing. I know that you do a lot in the community, but are they going to health, um, is the workplace doing their part in terms of, uh, uh, providing that education and orientation and certainly language I would imagine that might be a challenge or is it really by word of mouth, as you say, through the network that sacred heart community service works through,
Speaker 2 00:15:07 Those are all really, really important questions. What's really happening in our community in Seattle, the 86,000 cases as of yesterday here in Santa Clara County, over half of the cases have, um, uh, Latin X members of our community and nearly a third of the deaths, despite making up just a little over a quarter of the population. And that over-representation is very much a response to that. We know that a lot of Latinos and African Americans and others in particular are really likely to hold these essential services jobs, ironically, that we're heavily relying upon during this crisis, we're cleaning our buildings, getting food on our tables, taking care of our loved ones, including many of those for vulnerable and sick. Yes, these are the types of jobs that we undervalue in our society with adequate compensation and lack of healthcare access. So a lot of those underlying conditions that you mentioned are oftentimes results of these historic challenges that we have for communities of color have been subjected to centuries of racist policies that have led to inequitable access, to adequate healthcare education, housing, economic opportunity, and more, it was already a fire.
Speaker 2 00:16:05 COVID just kind of threw gasoline on that fire. So when it comes to responding to the situations and being able to get information out there about the mapping and social distancing and the protocols, but many of those have come to kind of rely upon. It's been a very, very difficult kind of situation where we're both telling firstly, members of Latin X communities and central workers in general, it's like you have to show up to work and we're not going to give you adequate healthcare. We're not going to make sure that you have access to time off, especially if people are working in the cash economy and other types of things, but you have to show up. Um, but if you do get tested and if you are diagnosed, then you're not going to be able to go to work. You're going to have to quarantine.
Speaker 2 00:16:47 And there really aren't adequate resources to kind of provide for you. It was kind of created this really, really difficult situation where you have homophobia is term for kind of a community promoter health promoter, but been utilized. And I'm sure you know this, but just for your listeners, community organizations that are reaching out, it's been a wonderful strategy. And we have partnerships that the County Santa Clara and their public health department has partnered with community-based clinics to try to make sure that people are actually able to hear about this and you're sharing that information, but there's still a great reluctance on the part of community to even respond to some of these kinds of conditions. So you have schools, churches, CDOs, health clinics, others sharing this information about what you can do, get tested, use these protocols, but at the same time, the demands of our economy and the demands of people's livelihoods just require people to actually keep coming to work.
Speaker 2 00:17:41 And we're just disincentivized from actually taking some of these protections. So it just created this almost like worst case scenario that we could ever imagined. You may know the information that will keep you on your family safe, but you're stuck. Even though we were organizing at the beginning of the pandemic with governor Newsome this quarter to help make sure that we could actually have eviction work for, and we had to organize locally to try to make sure that those went into effect. But a lot of what we found is that a lot of workers didn't really trust what was going on. And if they didn't have a week, cause they're renting like a garage or they're subletting, they're still getting evicted one way or another, they're getting kicked out and they're worried about their longer-term status. So we've actually seen a wave of dislocation. That's happened a number of families being pushed out of this particular area, even though we have eviction protections in place and without enough financial support or other types of things, particularly for our immigrant families that weren't eligible for unemployment or other resources, it's just, it's really created a really tough situation.
Speaker 2 00:18:41 But going back to your original question about how are they getting information? Are they getting the workplace? We did a lot of surveying of members. We brought together a coalition of 50 to 70 organizations to actually talk about what kind of resources or support that the community really wanted to need it. And within a few days we survey people about how they'd like to receive assistance financial and otherwise, and keyboardist. They really want it to go through trusted organizations in the community, churches, schools, small neighborhood, grassroots organizations, or those that they really trusted to receive assistance or advice from. And we've kind of working to try to build out those kinds of networks, but it's been very frustrating because like I said, even if you give them the information, their life circumstances are not as such that they could actually even follow all these directives because they still have to show up. They still have to do to make their lives work.
Speaker 3 00:19:28 Sure. It almost says you're speaking. I can just feel a set of walls kind of closing in that must be just such an untenable situation, not to have a choice, but to go to work, to continue to have a livelihood and provide for your families and then be at greater risk of contracting the virus. And as these directives are there and for all to follow, certainly I can see the disincentive aspect of that because it's almost like everyone's defeating the whole purpose of this because they don't have a choice to actually be safe and to practice these directives. I want to just ask about the services that are available since the COVID pandemic, because oftentimes I'm just quite struck by how so many of these services aren't necessarily reaching to communities. And I think the typical assumption is that perhaps there are language issues. What ask you about some of the cultural competency around some of the programs and, and initiatives and strategies during this pandemic? Obviously just the simple idea of being able to quarantine when you have families, perhaps multi-generations of families in a household or quarantine looks like there, perhaps there is a hotel where some workers can quarantine, but how realistic are some of these strategies for a community like the Latin X community?
Speaker 2 00:20:40 The answer is really kind of very mint. I just want to give a lot of our public health officer, Dr. Sir, Cody here in Santa Clara County is one of the first to ring the alarm bells and has been really, really up front about like making sure that people have the information they needed and trying to push things and be very aggressive around things like the shelter in place policies. There've been a lot of really positive things. And they've been innovating in terms of thinking about like, how do we come up with these different ideas and responses to those particularly, there's a lot of things that elected officials have tried to do to try to make sure that those trends, the neighbors that are living outside, but actually have places where they can actually go. And there's a heavy overrepresentation of planning population among the unhoused in our community.
Speaker 2 00:21:21 It was already a crisis before, but make them have to do it. So being able to lease motels, cut through red tape and actually build bridge housing or tiny homes and other types of things that are able to help people that are living outside, there's been some really kind of creative things and cutting through the opposition. That's often how they either overt or covert racist dog whistles, you know, saying, well, we don't really want those people in our neighborhoods, in our communities. Um, there's been a lot of work that elected officials have done to try and make sure those things happen after some of the first ways of testing or flopping. They realized that we needed to provide places for people to stay in a motel or hotel or to do some income replacement. If they can't work. The challenge was, you know, just the capacity to ramp that up and be able to make that accessible to people has been far outstripped the kind of infrastructure that we've had in place for a long time.
Speaker 2 00:22:09 So the ideas are there. The execution has been very difficult to do just based on the scale and especially during the rising, you know, during the winter months, um, it's, it's just gotten out of control. And so your heart was actually involved in a pilot project for it. And they said, you know, for the first three months we thought we'd do about 70 families, you know, that would get, that would need this kind of assistance. And within a few weeks there, they sent us 300 households. Even our organization was overrun the County of taking it on itself and trying to scale up. But it's been really hard to coordinate that and make sure that that is actually happening. It's been rough because you have great thinkers, great minds, uh, people with, you know, trying to do things, get the information out there, but the level of kind of coordination and the amount of resources that takes to be able to do this well and do this right, has been as kind of as outstripped our capacity.
Speaker 2 00:23:01 And there's a wider societal issues of like saying, well, we don't need to invest in public health infrastructure. We don't need to invest in making sure that there's an adequate and strong safety net for families. We don't need to invest in healthcare, outreach, education, other types of things. That's not really a priority because, you know, we don't want bloated government. What are considered inefficient systems until all of a sudden we need them, then we need to scale those up, you know, in a matter of, you know, weeks and months. Um, and we're actually feeling that, that the weight of that under-investment especially among these communities, but there's an opposite story, which is one of resilience and strength and power of communities coming together and coming up with their own solutions and people helping each other and people can't afford together. And they're moving in, you know, they're, they're saying you can come live with us.
Speaker 2 00:23:45 You can take our room. One of the reasons that we've seen more evictions in this community, like those informal evictions has been families, just lending money to each other. Sometimes they're borrowing it from payday lenders and other things, which is really, really bad, but they've also been like finding ways of supporting each other and keeping each other a float. Somebody gets sick people, delivering food to each other and other types of things like there's these amazing stories of kind of what's happening in this community of folks, just trying to hang on and see if the ability of these larger systems, but government policies and systems and organizations to kind of mirror and amplify those inherent strengths of Latin X communities. I think really, really important for us to kind of bear in mind as we think about the future.
Speaker 3 00:24:29 Absolutely. And I think, uh, certainly, uh, facilitating, you know, those types of more informal types of arrangements and, and encouraging them is something that we ought to be thinking about as a matter of policy. You know, you talk about community resilience. And I think oftentimes when we think about crises, it's about how do we start over, right? How do we put new resources into place? How do we look at perhaps new strategies? How do we have, you know, just, I always like to refer to kind of that next new shiny object that we want to put out there when in fact these communities have been, um, stressed many times over in the past, they have been able to demonstrate their resilience and their innovation. I want to just to see if you could comment on, um, what would happen if we actually started, um, building up the communities just from an asset perspective, you know, what, what they bring.
Speaker 3 00:25:17 I mean, obviously there's a lot of ingenuity and so much of what we're trying to get through with respect to this pandemic is going to be about, uh, how we get more creative. I mean, the housing situation, we're not going to be able to build enough housing units in the short term. So just how we, um, really respond to those types of issues. And, and I just don't want to have, um, our listeners walk away thinking that we have to start everything new. What, in fact, we have so much already, uh, that, uh, I'd like to call community assets from which we can continue to build and, and grow.
Speaker 2 00:25:47 Yeah. I think that, that is, that is really, like I said, there's, there's a big silver lining. I think of this particular moment. There's just seeing that strength and power of community to come together and people like helping each other out and reaching out to each other. One of our programs that we've been doing at sacred heart has been a network of most of the parents that have actually been providing it's called resilient families. And as a partnership that we did, there was a model that we're working with, our friends at Santa Clara university, we're developing this, but really they took some of these ideas and concepts about how individuals can deal with stressful situations. And actually that effort to not just provide the training to parents about how they can use mindfulness and other, other types of tools to kind of deal with stresses on their lives and prevent abuse and other types of issues in the community.
Speaker 2 00:26:34 But we basically put the curriculum in the hands of the graduates of the program. They adapted it, they made it their own, and it's been growing of this network and they've been the ones teaching the class. They're the ones that have actually discussed how things happen. And then with COVID, they basically said, we're going to turn this program that we were doing in Gilroy, and we're going to put it on steroids. We're going to put it online, using phones, creating these networks. They've just basically blown this up and creating these kinds of systems and networks and finding ways of not just training other people on these skillsets, but implementing those skillsets and finding ways that they could support each other and communicate with each other. And that level of resilience that to be seen is something that is so promising to kind of think of, of just the, the innovation, the talent, the connections that it really starts with people being in relationship with each other.
Speaker 2 00:27:24 That's the thing that I worry about the most, not only the situation, but, but just in general, in our fast moving society or the cost of whether you so hard that people have to spend all their time working, you know, multiple jobs and other things just to be able to make ends meet of the idea of creating and building and investing in community spaces and people coming together and being in relationship with each other is where you get the best ideas. It's where you get to kind of focus and attention and commitment largely to each other, to be able to make sure that we're going to weather this and other storms. And so is really amazing to think about that. And for public institutions in particular, to start re-imagining what their role is rather than just providing services to people, um, and how we do so in a cost effective way, like the most cost effective thing we can do is really engage and invite that leadership and participation of members of our community and our society to be part of these solutions and to actually contribute in different ways. It's been hugely beneficial to actually see the creativity and the commitment, but also fight against another aspect of this pandemic, which has been people can like isolated from each other and feeling like you're very alone. And that that's like a huge element of the mental health impacts of a pandemic. Like this are tremendous. And by putting people in relationship with each other that know that each other, that care about each other and are looking out for each other, that is really the heart of what building a community is really about
Speaker 3 00:28:53 And have shared lived experiences, right? So there's a commonality there. And also, you know, as I think about people coming together, this is true empowerment. These solutions are coming from, as you say, parents coming together in a network and just looking at solutions and strategies that are informed by, you know, what they're experiencing every day. You mentioned the work of this network of parents. And I really do want to focus some time on how the coronavirus has affected children in the region. Obviously schools have been closed and some are starting to reopen. And there is, I know funding that will be serving as a source of support for schools to hopefully be open safely in the near term that speak a little bit about the impacts of this virus on children. We don't often times hear about them, but for when they become a case, but this just has had to have tremendous impact on our young people
Speaker 2 00:29:56 In late February of last year. Like, uh, before, you know, before the full impact of the first renter wave, you know, hit us, we were doing some planning work. And one of the things that we saw very immediately financial impact on families to either have to arrange for some other form of childcare or not be able to work entirely. Especially if you see this disproportionately evolves who have been pushed out of the workforce too, based on, you know, sexist policies and how people get paid or whatever, if the family has to choose, who's going to stay home with their kids, the childcare responsibility, you know, like just the fact that the schools are defacto childcare, there were so many, you know, working households and just how devastating that is for folks working in service industry is that it just created like a really, really tough environment. So, I mean, the first impact on children is the kind of economic stress that's placed on the families for not being able to work. And then sometimes having to leave, move to like leave the area of one of our larger local school districts. And I was reporting a loss of thousands of kids who have just not, they just lost track of it. They have no idea where they are, they're being homeschooled, or if they've left the area entirely. I mean, that's just,
Speaker 2 00:31:08 Yeah, they're just like aware, are they, you know, um, you know, the superintendent called me up like late spring and said, do you know where they are? Um, we're trying to reach them and we can't find them. It was really bracing to hear that. And so we've been in contact with the families that we work with, even though education programs during the spring, what was really happening is like families were just really scared and trying to figure out ways to being able to do it. And they had been cut off from the schools because the school hadn't been doing as strong a job in terms of nurturing the relationships with parents and creating these networks and other things, some schools have done a better job than others, but I think that was one of the issues. The second impact on children, it really has to do with their academic impact.
Speaker 2 00:31:48 We already knew that a lot of, you know, working poor, you know, especially immigrant families in our community were struggling under another way of, you know, some of these school systems being dramatically under resourced. I mean, despite the new investments that the state has actually put into correcting or the historic and racist and inadequate funding levels using their better equity formula based school, then dramatically had a resource. So we already knew that a lot of kids were starting school without some of the equalizers, um, um, that you would normally want pre-K and other types of things, but a lot, a lot of kids didn't have, and they're already struggling there, but removing them from the school, not being able to have some of the academic supports from different organizations like ours and others that provide after-school types of resources and other things to help them to keep tutoring are actually running, you know, summer programs that eliminate learning loss.
Speaker 2 00:32:41 You just had kids not getting access to education or those resources for months on end. And then with a lot of the families not having access to adequate technology or wifi or other types of things. Um, then a lot of other school districts have actually done some really amazing work to try to get technology into kids' hands and be able to do that. It's been, it's just been a really, really huge challenge that you see a lot of districts being very, very creative we're here in Silicon Valley. And I just remember hearing from our districts about how the telecom companies, you know, they're saying like they were happy that they're going to provide this kind of technology, but they weren't going to give any discounts or anything in terms of access. They were like, good. We're going to get a lot more customers that kind of greed and excess.
Speaker 2 00:33:26 It's just something that, that was just horrible. But what we saw with parents, the lack of stability for families, um, like I mentioned before, and the access to schools and, and, and, and the technology that that was needed, what you actually saw were parents themselves organizing themselves saying like, these are the expectations that we have of the districts need to be communicating with those who need to be making sure that we have the resources. We need to make sure that you're educating us on how we can support our kids in the situation that they're doing it from home. We need to have, we need to make sure that you're giving us current technology, you know, letting us know when things are happening, we need to be involved and invested and saw that, that kind of parents, not only helping other parents were speaking out, but half of other times, but they were actually engaging other parents and in creating that expectation a new, so that's just another example of the parents just being like doing everything they can for their kids, right.
Speaker 2 00:34:19 In this situation. But the long-term health impacts and economic impacts, you know, the, the interruption of these, these academic resources and other things is really, really, um, uh, disheartening. The other aspect too, is families just sharing economic pinch that we've seen in the schools, like stepping up their efforts to feed families and to be able to make it, you know, make those resources available. Kind of like no questions asked, we're not gonna stop it, don't do it. They were these programs for, you know, for quite some time. And, uh, and that's been, that was really, really encouraging to try to, you know, make it, and de-stigmatize the fact that, Hey, everyone needs some help sometimes. And I think that's been, that's been really encouraging, but I think, um, I think the biggest concern is what, what are the long-term implications? You know, both for our economy and our health and others, you know, and their health of, of children's education being interrupted in such a fundamental way.
Speaker 3 00:35:14 Yes, yes, absolutely. We spoke about the fact that so many of the families with whom you work are working in multiple jobs, we've also known that we've had considerable wage disparity for the better part of over four decades. What's your hope after this pandemic? Do you think that we have essentially ripped the band-aid off to just really have everyone recognize how vulnerable our economy really is when we are placing so much emphasis on these essential workers, obviously first and foremost, our frontline healthcare workers, but even those who work in the service industries are doing everything they can to provide for their customers and families. What's your hope in terms of lessons learned coming out of this pandemic, as it relates to work and work opportunities
Speaker 2 00:36:01 Of three main thoughts that I have about this? One of them is like the awareness. And I think there's an element of kind of voice and, you know, and, and maybe a reconfiguration around power and oxygen with those three ideas are, I think one of the lessons learned is that I think where for a long time, we've had this idea that we know that there's some people that are struggling more, the larger community has actually seen data and elected leaders have known for some time that they're just barriers that exist in our community, but to actually see the disproportionality of the impact of COVID on certain communities in certain neighborhoods has just completely expose the spotlight. I don't think anyone could have ever imagined. So the awareness of like, Oh my gosh, you're seeing twice the number of people, you know, in a community as wealthy as Silicon Valley that have been in talked about this virus, because they're there they're Latin X, you know, like that, that is a huge, huge prop in the face to anyone saying like, well, you know, it's just, everything's about economics.
Speaker 2 00:37:05 Everything's just about that. No, they're, they're abused really deeply rooted racial disparities that exist in our communities and our systems and our economy. And I think raising that awareness, putting a spotlight on it and being able to make sure that people understand, like we can't ignore this any longer, because it really puts our larger community at risk, you know, and the other element of awareness, you know, kind of beyond those disparities and the disproportionate impact there both in terms of cases and death is also how much are our community relies upon Latin X workers to four essential, essential jobs in our economy. And we started developing a program to actually provide financial relief to families. <inaudible>
Speaker 2 00:37:46 partnered with the city of San Jose and the County to actually engage different community stakeholders around, um, how we should do that rather than us deciding for the community, how to provide resources to the community. We engage these not only stakeholder groups, but also invited those stakeholder groups to actually directly survey and talk to their community members and ask them how they want it to be served and who they trusted and, and how they wanted to get information. And, uh, and that was really, really foundational for us because we heard people, you know, saying as a result of the survey that, that they wanted to hear from, you know, their, their churches and their schools and other folks that this was okay, they wanted to, um, they want it to be involved in sharing the information through word of, and, and it wasn't, you know, like they, they actually prefer that there were smaller dollar amounts.
Speaker 2 00:38:40 They're getting to them quickly, um, to make sure that more people could benefit rather than fewer families would that commitment to actually working together was really, really amazing. And when you think about, you know, um, when we do better, when we actually send the voice of community members to help us respond to these issues, and we trust them to actually come up with a solution and be directly involved in that. And I think that's really, really important. The third lesson learned from this pandemic is that it doesn't matter what resources we throw into it or programs that we have if we're not affecting public policy and we're not pushing and building power for community members that are disproportionally impacted, we'll just face those similar or worse situation. The next time around, I was mentioning earlier that there were still evictions, you know, illegal evictions taking place.
Speaker 2 00:39:29 Um, the thing that's really protected most families from the worst impacts of this pandemic is then the efforts to actually engage in policy. Like it's like the eviction moratorium and being able to, um, you know, really make housing or other things happen in the face of neighborhood opposition, um, it's policy, you know, and, and decisions that are made by our policy makers, you know, with the support of community members and others speaking up and saying, we need to be able to do this, doing those courageous things, making these kinds of investments, the cares act, you know, did a lot of really wonderful things. Unemployment resources were among the most critical things that help so many folks, but it literally left behind or ignored, you know, the, the, the cries for help of immigrant families that weren't eligible for unemployment. And so these efforts that where people were actually standing up and fighting, we're really an important lesson to be learned about.
Speaker 2 00:40:25 This is how we should be. We should be thinking about this, not just during this moment of crisis, but always so a community organizing and community voices, and making sure that people are involved and engaged needs to be central to our thinking about how we respond to all these situations. And hopefully the lessons that we've learned about how, you know, we don't live in a multicultural meritocracy where the economy just works for everyone. We just aware that we have these underlying conditions, systemic racism in our society have created these fault lines that really erupted and have contributed to, you know, really significantly disproportionate impacts on the Latin X community and other, um, BiPAP communities as well.
Speaker 3 00:41:07 So you're speaking poncho about, uh, inclusion of community voice. I I'm finding myself smiling because some of the initial pushback of community action agencies was that very issue. You have community members who actually were serving on boards of these organizations and, and really bringing that perspective to the boards. And, you know, it is a power dynamic and a power struggle. I think when you bring new voices to the table at any given point in time, but here have community voices that have been, uh, I mean, I must say, have been beyond resilient and have had to overcome many challenges after another, and to be able to really include these voices and the solutions and to really trust, you know, what we are learning from them to inform the solutions. I think it's just so important. And it suggests to me that we're not just solving for the crisis of today, but that what we mean by building resilience is to be able to withstand any other future shocks and pandemics and other challenges. So, uh, this is a very, very important concept, and I'm just so impressed by the extensiveness of just how you incorporate and include the community members in your work. I wanted to shift gears a little bit and just talk about sacred heart community service. Again, you rely on a volunteer network and, uh, tell us about how that works with the COVID crisis. Our volunteers, actually in the physical presence of one another, are we doing most of the work virtually, give us a flavor of what that looks like.
Speaker 2 00:42:32 This has been the biggest shock to our system. You know, to be honest, our core business model relies on hundreds of daily volunteers. And like I may have mentioned, we typically have over 10,000 volunteers a year that actually come through our building and they help us with things like sorting food and clothing and being able to distribute those to the community. And, uh, and then all of our programs, whether it's tutoring children or being able to leave workshops, you know, helping people find employment or access, um, you know, help them do their taxes. We've had to really radically change everything that we do instead of having anywhere between a hundred to 200 volunteers a day. We've, you know, we've minimized the numbers, we've drawn out how we're going to do it. We provide, you know, obviously the personal protective equipment for actually having people answer these questions and making sure that we're able to take their temperature and other, other types of things to try and make sure that everyone is saying you're really safe.
Speaker 2 00:43:25 Um, but we've been doing things like, obviously you're doing deep panelization cleanings and other things like three times a week and keeping everyone social distance and it's really, really hard to do it. Um, and it used to be that you would have, you know, a long line of people coming through our lobby. And now we, you know, we're maintaining a social distancing and we're wrapped around the corner, you know, outside, you know, for hours each day. Um, but we're, you know, we're only letting five people in the building. Everything has just been tremendously disruptive in terms of how we're able to do it, but the volunteers are one of the bigger areas of, of, you know, kind of a challenge for us to go and do the work. So we've had to reduce the numbers of volunteers, but we also had like a core group and many of them are retirees.
Speaker 2 00:44:09 And we've said, no, you are in these, you know, underlying, if you have some of these underlying health conditions or your at risk populations, you want to be really careful about that. So, so a number of them have either reduced the frequency that they're coming or stop coming because of really well-founded concerns, but we've actually created a very, as safe and environments we can, you know, for, and that's been, you know, that's been really interesting, but I think the biggest challenge has been, we've had lots of groups from like corporate and schools and civic organizations that were part of our ongoing infrastructure of the organization that basically said, sorry, we can't do that anymore. So one of the results of that has been great. We have a clothing closet where we provide clothing and bedding and other types of hygiene items and things like that, things like that, that we, that we've run for the entirety of our existence, that we've had to shut down, just, just to try to make sure that we're keeping things safe and not having to process lots of donations of, of those types and having many hands touching something.
Speaker 2 00:45:09 So we've eliminated that element of our work, that we're still doing a food program that has, you know, increased, you know, an average from an average of 400 households or four 50 houses a day to over 600 households a day that are coming to us for food assistance. But on the other hand, we've also created other, you know, uh, volunteer opportunities for people who are doing, um, that were helping us process financial assistance and helping out with doing that remotely. You know, we've been able to kind of create these other FOMO, you know, like skillsets, but where people are reaching out to others. And so, and then, you know, moving our work, um, our community organizing or mutual support work, and those things kind of moving online to workshops and trainings and meetings and conversations that we've had that are happening. You know, we even had our, in our goal, uh, we had a solidarity summit that we did in September where we had over 700 participants, kind of join us for a live stream, you know, event where they're learning about issues and policies and, and, and developing a policy agenda and talking about how, you know, these issues are affecting our community and how they can all stand up and, and respond in different ways and learn about how to, how to fight for affordable housing and push things on the ballot.
Speaker 2 00:46:24 Didn't. Um, but we were able to kind of have a different level of engagement than we normally have. And normally we don't normally have events where 700 people are coming all at once, but it was, it was exciting to kind of see people like finding ways of actually responding to each other and, uh, and, and trying to find ways of being in solidarity with each other. So it's been a, it's been a huge disruption, but also an opportunity for real, for real creativity and innovation. We innovated out of necessity.
Speaker 3 00:46:51 You raise a great point about the source of volunteers, and certainly when businesses shut down and schools shut down a major source of volunteers also shuts down that it is very heartening to hear that there are others who do want to be civically engaged in other ways that have probably been a more direct impact on the families and the communities you serve. So a very heartened to, to hear that, um, I wanted to just ask you about what would be helpful to sacred heart community service from our listeners. I know that often, uh, our listeners want to help and whether it's volunteering or making financial contributions, how can they do that a best way of
Speaker 2 00:47:30 Being able to help, obviously, like, I think you mentioned that thank you for doing that pitch for us, but like, tell me if you would like to make a, a, a contribution, a financial contribution. Those are really, really important. We've actually had to hire more staff, um, you know, uh, to actually help compensate for the lack of volunteers, but we really need, we need volunteers. We need financial donations. So our, our, our web addresses, uh, sacred heart, cs.org. So sacred heart, let's take RCS for community service org. And, uh, and so you can sign up to volunteer and come on down or make a donation. Those things are really, really important, but I think, uh, more, just as important is, like I said, the policy work that is really, really important. So helping to support legislation around extending the eviction moratorium in the state and being able to do that.
Speaker 2 00:48:18 And there's a work that's happening in capital, try to advance that if we're going to get through this and actually have a successful recovery, we need to make sure that immigrant families are not left behind in that from a housing perspective, the ability for us to cut through the red tape and try to make some of these changes happen, um, at a local level from the local resistance starts rebuilding and creating affordable housing, um, is still a very, very incredible, incredibly important and tangible thing that people can go to do and helping to support legislation that is moving through. There've been some positive things that we've seen in the governor's proposed budget and legislative package, but then there's a lot of other things that we could be doing as well. So we're hopeful that the negative impact of the COVID, the awareness of learning that people have had translates into, you know, community members like the listeners for your podcast, being able to speak out and speak up, but let our legislators know that we can and should be doing everything in our tool kit and adding more tools to our tool kit to make sure that we're actually creating, um, a more just kind of economy and, and situation where you can actually afford to live and thrive and contribute to their communities.
Speaker 2 00:49:31 Um, particularly as a result assaulted with the pandemic, really raging, like I said, we were already on fire and this was not a gasoline to that fire of economic dislocation and destruction and economic divide and threatened to be worse, but it could also be the thing that brings us together. You know, if we're able to kind of work on mock stuff and address some of these root causes through public policy.
Speaker 3 00:49:55 Absolutely. And to your point earlier, I really embrace the idea of each of us viewing ourselves as an advocate and beginning to understand the experiences of others who are different from us and being able to really help lift that voice of the community members. And, uh, oftentimes I think, uh, what is forgotten with respect to some of the, uh, government programs is, um, it's okay to have little set aside for some technical assistance that, uh, strategies aren't a one size fits all, uh, when it comes being in crisis. And so I'm hopeful that we could even navigate for some more flexibility around what we're seeing in terms of dollars coming to communities, panto, do you live in San Jose? You'd have two daughters. Yes.
Speaker 2 00:50:40 Yeah. I've got two teenage daughters. Uh, one, uh, one who turns 14 in a few weeks and another one who's about to turn 17. So it's been a very interesting to spend a fair amount of time with them as they do the virtual learning. Um, but they also, some of the learnings have been not just in the classroom, you know, and what we're hearing, but, but actually I think during the, uh, during the setup rising this past summer, you know, they both were coming to join some of the protests and other things about, about racial justice and the kind of conversations that we've had, both impromptu and things that they're learning and the oral, even through social media and other types of other forms of kind of communication. So it's been like the best of times when the worst of times in so many different ways it's been challenging, but it's been amazing also to see how they're absorbing, um, the situation and how fired up they are. So I'm really excited about their generation. Maybe they'll clean up the mess.
Speaker 3 00:51:43 That is my hope as well. And what, what do you think as they continue their life journey and look back at this point in time, what impression will this leave on them?
Speaker 2 00:51:54 I'm just talking about this a few nights ago, which is that this moment has been so utterly transformative for, you know, for the community in terms of like their sense of like how much privilege that they have to actually have a referral of their head and be able to have technology that they can actually do their schoolwork and some other things and realizing that things aren't the same for everyone. Like this was, this was something that was really alarming for them, but I think there's also a sense of, you know, I think as they learned about politics and they learned about, you know, some of the, some of the challenges and dysfunction in our political system where decisions that seem really obvious for them, if going to make people stay home and we should make sure that they can afford to stay here, it just didn't make any sense.
Speaker 2 00:52:41 Like why, why, why were these delays by providing more unemployment? Or why are we excluding, you know, immigrant workers who are such a part of the fabric of our community from getting assistance, that's just fundamentally wrong to them. And I think that, I think the, the impact of, of those kinds of things, just seeing, you know, the, the relative, you know, safety and security that they have. Um, and, and the injustice of that compared to, you know, the instability of so many others in our society, um, and the political deadlock, um, made them pretty disgusted and pretty fired up to make sure that, you know, that we can, that we need to be working collectively and pulling together. It just seems obvious to them that we should be helping each other out. And I think the lesson too is like wear a mask. I mean, it's the least we can do, you know, like stay at home or home has like take care of each other, communicate like talk to the grandparents, you know, let them know that they loved them, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 00:53:42 But, you know, but we'll, we'll get through this and, you know, and we can show our love and affection for each other in different ways. All those things were like really, really amazing thing. But I, you know, you may feel the same way, but I, I look at children as being our best teachers. Um, they were able to point out the obvious, it's really heartening to kind of see the fact that they're, that they are getting, you know, what it means to actually live in a community, even though they're cut off from so much of a PE space.
Speaker 3 00:54:10 Absolutely. And certainly with this pandemic, I always say, you know, no filters, th th the experiential aspect of their education today is invaluable, invaluable. And for so many young people, I'm just starting in with your two daughters. I'm happy to hear this because I am I finding this more and more as I engage with young people and that as they are developing a very find a racial and economic equity and justice lens through which I think they're going to be looking at life as they got older. And I think that's a very positive thing. And when I think about just the kind of change that we need to make to truly lift up communities and to make transformative change, I, it was just really an all punch of what you've done. You've been in this space for a long time and in different capacities. And I just wanted to just see if you would just share some thoughts about what continues to give you hope when you keep doing this work. I know you've talked about just how you're inspired by what you see the community members do, but just the, the scale and the magnitude of just how many are struggling among us, what inspires you every day to continue to do this work?
Speaker 2 00:55:18 Well, I think, I mean, I think of like one of our, one of our leaders leaders that, you know, her uncle, her husband was unemployed and, you know, and she was with their eight year old son, they're trying to figure out how that makes things kind of work. And, you know, and she ended up getting COVID and, you know, she had, you know, recovered, but she didn't feel like she was before. And so it was, it was hard because they were trying to, you know, keep, you know, stay away from each other, from her husband, so he wouldn't get affected. And he would give you all to get back to work at, you know, things picked up, you know, and everything was going up, prices, specials, you know, tomatoes milk can be, you know, doubled, you know, all these things that were happening at their local stores.
Speaker 2 00:55:58 And, and, you know, the expenses were actually happening and, you know, they had to actually get internet on there. Son started distance learning, and then obviously worrying about like how she gets to the hospital and these other issues, because the risk of the contagion and really worried about so many different things. But what was amazing is that like, she reached out for help and she, you know, we gave, you know, she said, I, I need some help with the college. And we, we got a laptop for them. And before the schools were able to kind of start distributing those things, you know, and she was able to kind of get help and support and find other, you know, families in the neighborhood who were experiencing the same issues and that she was able to, you know, feel like she was really connected with those. Some were able to provide some financial assistance from Elise to her family.
Speaker 2 00:56:41 She was incredibly grateful. And so she's been really fired up, continues to come. You know, she's been helping out and volunteering and reaching out to other parents. And it's like, these are the types of moments. I think w what I'm really walking away with examples, like Alisha were talking to the roughest time of her life and, you know, and she had the choice to maybe move out of the area or something like that. But she did the really creative thing as a parent to actually ask for help. Cause that's the United in our society. When we have to admit that we can't handle it all ourselves and our first responsibilities towards children. And when we feel like we don't have the ability to help make that happen, and this is a woman who's very prideful, got her education and they're working again, but the situation just kind of knock them on their tails and they needed to ask for help.
Speaker 2 00:57:28 She building always swallow your pride, ask for help, but also receive it and then be creative about it. And then now be really deeply committed to helping other families. This is kind of, I think that's the lesson that I'm learning right now is that the situation was, or wasn't fair in the first place. And it impacted them. And we were there for them in that way. And now she's like a lifer with us. Who's going to be committed to this work and really fired up to make sure that her whole community is safe and protected. We had a recent conversation about the vaccines and saying, why are we fighting everywhere that we can to make sure that, you know, workers like me, you know, like her husband didn't end up contracting COVID, even though she got it or able to get that and making sure that other folks in the community are able to have it, that awareness commitment is something that is going to stick with me forever, because it was, it was the greatest thing to see the relief in her eyes when she was able to get some financial assistance from us and saying like, I can pay back some friends and family that I borrowed to actually help pay the rent, just that kind of relief and that kind of resilience, and that kind of power the diving into a dialogue, but who has the power to make these decisions around, who's going to get the assistance that they need for this next phase is something that is just something that sits with me each and every day, seeing families doing everything they can to not only survive, but thrive and take care of each other is really, really the big lesson of this.
Speaker 3 00:58:54 Thank you, Paula, for sharing that, you know, lifting community voice and power building community resiliency, fostering, and encouraging community. Self-determination. I mean, all of this is embedded in the work of sacred heart community service. If just shared an experience where I hope our listeners can really see the value of supporting organizations like sacred heart community service. If you care to make a donation or volunteer with sacred community service, please visit the website sacred hearts, see us.org again, sacred heart cs.org, poncho. Thank you so much for spending this time with us and to just illuminate us about the experiences of the community during this very, very challenging time, but also tremendous strength of the community. It is a hopeful note on which we conclude our podcasts, but to also just give my thanks and express my gratitude for your sustained work in this area, this is tough work. It is not for the faint of heart that you really just have a tremendous focus and embrace the assets of the communities in which you're serving. And I think that is really where we should always have our eyes and that the people who are just needing a little bit of help are going to end up being our greatest sources of strength in our communities going forward. Thank you very much for joining us today.
Speaker 0 01:00:15 Thank you so much. And please stay safe and make sure that people are connected and actually care about what's happening. Thank you. And
Speaker 3 01:00:30 Thank you. Stay safe.
Speaker 0 01:00:37 This is Betty you signing off until the next episode of the California table. <inaudible> paid for by Betty Yee for treasurer 2026.
