Gathering of Latino/a Leaders in Northfield

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on September 2, 2007

On Saturday August 31st, a group of 11 of us Latinos and Latinas working in Northfield and Faribault met at Just Foods Cooperative community room for the first time. Our purpose was to start a process of organizing a network of Latino/a leaders in the Southern half of Minnesota. One representative from Mankato was not present but came to Northfield on Saturday morning to get a personal update and meet with me regarding the results of the meeting.

Though not a surprising revelation, we learned that we all share common experiences, but we were able to narrow our issues and mission enough to start a serious and focused conversation. We agreed that there is a need to establish a training schedule for all of us over the coming months as a way to improve the network participant’s knowledge, and ability to deliver results to our communities and the institutions that we depend on for services (schools, community edudation, police, city services, etc.)

We will be meeting the last Friday of every month alternating meeting places on a rotational basis among the cities that will be represented in the network. At this point, the following issues are being discussed as part of our focus:

- Enterprise/Economic development
- Access to Health Servicies
- Community Safety
- School connectedness

These are not random issues, we all understand that integration of our communities will not happen until we address issues of poverty and the social and psychological conditions derived from the barriers and the self perpetuating cycles associated with poverty. Though poverty is one of the main sources of the economic and educational limitations of our communities, we understand poverty first hand ourselves and believe that we can lead others out of it trough connectedness, access to services, better education and above all through civic engagement. Though social programs and other support services are key to sustain people on a day-to-day basis, by themselves they are not meant to deal with the root causes of poverty. These are reasons why we must do whatever it takes to think outside the box, avoid duplicating programs, work within our communities to maximize the success of what is already available and only create new programs when they are not available or when what is available does not address our community needs.

We will pursue the development of our network by coordinating efforts and supporting each other’s work and the work of many other organizations in our communities, by developing and supporting new leaders, so that we can increase our overall capacity, and by working with the wider community on the issues outlined above.

Through these and other strategies we hope to carve a path for people to “walk” out of isolation and into more engaged lifestyles.  This is a strategy that will allow us to walk with folks as they get themselves out of poverty, rather than pretend that we can “pull” people our of poverty.  Defining poverty is probably another issue that we need to address.  The governmental and widely accepted definition of who is poor is narrowly governed by issues of money, as we look at our own countries of origin, some of us know that sometimes the richest people don’t have much in the area of material posessions and material wealth.  Though we are not in the business of deciding what means to live better for anyone, or about re-defining concepts and terminology, we will discuss the issues of poverty with a wider approach.  Issues of networking to establish support systems for adults and children go a long way into enriching a person’s life, growing food does not increase income but decreases expenses, consequently is another issue to consider, sharing resources among neighbors and reducing waste has a similar effect, etc. The idea is to think outside the establishment and see if we can contribute new ideas and strategies to this issue of integration and community development.

Our work still needs to be defined and weather we can build the network successfully is still up in the air, but we are doing our best and will keep doing so until we succeed.  The nice thing about our approach is that we are all voluntarilly coming together, are all natural leaders, are well connected in our own circles, and some of us have regional, national and international networks.  We will also look into what it means to be successful, the concept not giving up weather or not we get things right the first time.  With these resources and attitute one can try and fail many times without giving up, this element is crucial as none of us can wave a magic wand and solve our issues.

We all agreed on a collective vision which I provide here:

“Rooted in a desire to serve our communities, we personally committ to the creation of a network of Latino/a leaders so that we may explore, design, sustain, develop and implement ideas with the purpose of responding to the basic needs among Latino/a communities to organize, access basic services and resources, be represented in governmental and non-governmental organizations, and the business sectors within the regions or cities where Latino/a communities are settled”

We also started a conversation on an organizational structure, necessary for effective coordination within the context of the tools available and the constrains and barriers that affect our communities’ ability to communicate among each other and with our leaders. This organizational structure must be simple, broad based, representative of a critical percentage of the population, and effective at communicating with the grassroots as much as with the community at-large. A design will be discussed at the September meeting.

Comments

One Response to “Gathering of Latino/a Leaders in Northfield”