The Kings Beach Community Empowerment Conference on May 30 wants to create a masterpiece of community involvement and participation. Creciendo Unidos and Creating Alternatives, a local community coalition, is sponsoring the event.
‘Organizers bring the canvas, the community draws the picture. The organizer may bring out a beautiful shading of what the community wants in the painting, but the community has the ideas,’ explains Emilio Vaca, a facilitator for Creciendo Unidos and Creating Alternatives, and the newly hired Executive Director of the Family Resource Center in Kings Beach.
A vibrant painting includes many different colors and textures. The palette of the North Shore is changing, with the Latino population in Incline Village at 12 percent, almost 50 percent in Kings Beach and close to 13 percent in Truckee. ‘This is a key opportunity for all of us, and by that I mean everyone who lives in the North Shore area. Kings Beach, Incline Village, Tahoe City, even Truckee – all have the same issues. We are Lake Tahoe – we need to rally around the things we have in common such as keeping jobs here,’ Vaca says. He believes the common themes of the region include smart growth, the environment, housing, employment, and traffic control.
The Community Empowerment conference has caught the eye of people nationwide, with prominent national, state and regional figures coming to take part. They will join local community organizers providing leadership training and community development to help North Shore residents create an action plan for the community.
One of the masters of bringing canvases to life is Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers and known for her work with Cesar Chávez. An avid activist for over 50 years, Huerta will be the keynote speaker at the Community Empowerment Conference. Huerta, who recently turned 78, continues to crisscross the country for the Dolores Huerta Foundation, whose mission is ‘to build active communities working for fair and equal access to healthcare, housing, education, jobs, civic participation and economic resources for disadvantaged communities with an emphasis on women and youth.’ She is well versed in training and inspiring communities to work together in building a plan for their future.
Huerta worked with Chávez for over 30 years, until his death in 1993. Together, they founded many foundations and organizations, including the National Farm Workers Service Center, which provides affordable housing and
Spanish-speaking radio stations throughout California, Washington, and Arizona.
Her lifelong work for social justice and community organizing includes involvement in the passage of legislation and laws for farm workers, and directing the United Farm Workers’ national grape boycott in 1970, taking the plight of the farm workers to the consumers. The boycott resulted in the entire California table grape industry signing a collective bargaining agreement with the United Farm Workers. She has been arrested over 22 times for participating in numerous non-violent disobedience activities and strikes. And, she keeps on going. I recently spoke with her on the phone while she was campaigning for Hillary Clinton in Indiana.
‘The number one priority in community organizing…that is to create a base, a coalition and collaboration of people that care about the same issues,’ she says. Huerta believes her job is to train organizers to organize the ‘base.’ Her experience has shown that leadership surfaces through this process, often by self-identification or by participants.
That’s what happened for Creciendo Unidos and Creating Alternatives, which started two years ago with seven concerned Latino parents in the North Shore. They were worried about their children and the drug problem, and wanted to get involved. Vaca encouraged them to focus on their strengths and to believe that ‘the solution was in the problem itself.’ Seven parents turned into 50, Latino and Anglo. The police department, community and county organizations also joined – and then the kids starting coming.
Vaca remembers the kids saying, ‘What about us?’ The youth organized and became involved with ‘Friday Night Live,’ a California Drug/Alcohol Prevention Network. Recently, the youth group produced a bilingual anti-methamphetamine DVD that will be shown to the Governor’s Prevention Advisory Council in July. Creciendo Unidos and Creating Alternatives have sponsored other activities including a drug/alcohol free Mexican Independence Day last September in Kings Beach, with around 2,000 people participating.
Vaca says that Creciendo Unidos chose not to become a non-profit, because ‘we don’t want to exist forever. This conference is a beginning to empower our community to take care of their own programs.’
‘Community means coming together in unity,’ Vaca says. ‘Now is the time to develop positive outcomes for the social issues that affect our region.’
Vaca’s experiences with community organizing started early, while he was the student body president at Modesto Junior College. He says Huerta ‘took him under her wing,’ when he was a student organizer for the United Farm Workers. He was the state president of La Raza Unida Caucus, which organized Latino students, and the President of Region V (Stockton to Bakersfield) of the California Student Association of Community Colleges. Vaca organized a march on the Sacramento capitol in the spring of 2003, where more than 20,000 students protested budget cuts and increased student fees. He also worked with the AFL-CIO in the Midwest and Southern California.
In 2003, when his sister was studying at Sierra Nevada College, she encouraged him to enroll at the same school. ‘I told her and everyone else, I’m not going to get involved, I’m just going to go to school,’ Vaca says. As the first male Latino student at Sierra Nevada, events occurred that convinced him otherwise. He was eating his lunch in a classroom, waiting for the class to start, when the head janitor came into the room and told him, ‘When you’re done with your break, get out of this room before class begins.’ Vaca eventually was elected as Student Body President for the college, and started working with the local community. Now married and the father of an infant daughter, Vaca believes that the conference embodies the words of Cesar Chavez, ‘Life is the best learning book you can ever have.
The youth segment of the conference begins on Friday morning at 8 a.m. Youth from the Tahoe basin, Reno, Carson and other areas will look at the issues in order to create a regional perspective. The youth will develop an action plan with three easy goals that can be obtained in the first year. Workshops including ‘Grassroots 101’ will be taught, and a youth leadership group formed.
The adult component starts at 6 p.m. – dinner and childcare will be provided at no cost to the participants. The adults will participate in a similar round of workshops as the youth did – also creating an action plan. The evening will culminate with bridging and combing the adult and youth plans to develop a common and collective vision toward solving the issues.
Possibly attending the conference is artist, poet and community activist José Montoya, whose work lay the foundation for the Royal Chicano Air Force, internationally recognized for its political mural and poster work during the Chicano Movement in the 1970s. Montoya was named poet laureate of Sacramento in 2002. A representative of California First Lady, Maria Shriver, has also expressed interest in attending.
The Truckee Tahoe Community Foundation is funding the conference, with partnerships from other non-profits.
Huerta strongly believes in illuminating the community landscape with the truth. ‘It’s all about educating people in the process. Corporate media doesn’t tell the entire story,’ she said. She says she spends most of her time enlightening people on the issues, and encouraging them to realize that we are equal. ‘We are all one human race,’ she says.
‘Dolores told me, someone has to dig that trench in order to know what to do with the trench,’ Vaca says. He humbly believes that as one of the trench diggers, ‘…you need to be willing to do the work.’
Kings Beach Community Empowerment Conference
Where: North Lake Tahoe Conference Center
When: May 30, 2008,
8 am for students
6 pm for adults
Info: Emilio Vaca, emiliovaca@hotmail.com 530-386-6253
