Latino Leaders Making a Difference in the Community
The Latino Leadership Program (LLP) promotes Latino activism and leadership through popular education, skills training and mentoring, as well as by initiating and leading community organizing campaigns to defend parents’ and immigrants’ rights.
Lucia Santana came to the U.S. from Puerto Rico when she was 18. She had three young children and the equivalent of a 9th grade education. Lucia spent the next 13 years at home raising her family (now numbering 6 children), not believing she had anything to offer her community.
Magalis Troncoso of City Life / Vida Urbana, who met Lucia in 1999, believed otherwise and urged Lucia to join City Life’s Latino Leadership Program (LLP). Hearing the diverse stories of other program participants inspired Lucia to believe that she too had something to give. Of her participation in the LLP, she says, "Before, I thought nobody cared about me and what happened to me, but I realized that is not the reality." Now Lucia is a full-time organizer with City Life, supporting the Jamaica Plain Parent Organizing Project (JPPOP, a collaboration with the Hyde Square Task Force). She helps parents learn to advocate for the educational rights of their own children and all children, and to see themselves as potential leaders.
Through the Latino Leadership Program, City Life works with community members like Lucia to develop the confidence and skills to contribute to our neighborhoods. The program’s monthly workshops cover a broad range of topics from the basic principles of community organizing to specific issues affecting the Latino community. Outside of the workshops, participants gain real life organizing experience within other City Life initiatives-JPPOP, the Tenant Organizing Initiative, or organizing to increase voter registration and mobilization among Latinos.
In 2002, LLP participants organized and participated in rallies and forums on issues such as education and immigration. In August last year, a delegation of parents and advocates met with Mayor Menino and won the restoration of $10 million dollars that the city had cut from education.
Another high point was a massive mobilization of Latino voters in fall 2002. In this joint effort between City Life, the JPNDC, and the Hyde Square Task Force, LLP graduates registered and mobilized voters in the Hyde Square precincts of Jamaica Plain. Thanks in large part to the participation of these new leaders, there was a dramatic increase in Latino voter participation in the the targeted precincts. The skills gained-public speaking, confidence and assertiveness, how to develop campaigns and strategies-and the visibility of Latino activists are lasting victories that strengthen our community and move us forward in building a multiethnic grassroots movement for social and economic justice.