I came from Mexico to this country as a teenager with my parents and 13 brothers and sisters. We lived in a labor camp and worked long hours in the fields of the Salinas Valley. After learning English, I was fortunate to get an internship with a local TV station. Thus began a rapidly advancing career in television and community-development programs, plus a hard-won degree in communications from UCSC. This personal history has given me great empathy for the hopes for a better life sought by the mostly immigrant population of the Mission that the Mission Promise Neighborhood (MPN) serves. Now tasked with the oversight of the grassroots outreach for MPN, I work to ensure that our group of community outreach workers, or promotoras, have the tools and information needed to connect the Mission District’s low-income Latinos to the free services available from our network of neighborhood partners. MPN’s goal—and my goal—is to help our families obtain economic success, so that their children can achieve at school. That is the winning formula of the MEDA/MPN team, of which I am privileged to be a part.”
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