Youth Alive! – Margaret's Place and Camp St. Francis
Youth Alive! is a comprehensive program of personal growth, service, and educational and recreational opportunities. Youth Alive! is also a youth group organized around the vision of the specialness and sacredness of every person and of their related responsibility to live lives of passionate commitment to themselves, their families, their communities, and to the building of peace and justice. It is an interfaith program that does not promote any one spiritual belief, but acknowledges the spirituality common to all of us.
Youth Alive! is an outgrowth of nearly twenty-five years of work in Camphora and Jimenez farm labor camps near Soledad. Other camps have been part of this program, but due to staff limitations, we are currently only working in Camphora and Jimenez. We work primarily with the children of farm workers, and more recently, have helped to facilitate English as a Second Language classes for their parents. We serve approximately 200 youth, from preschool age through high school age, in both camps. The program has an open enrollment. We take a census annually in late October.
Margaret’s Place is our physical site in Camphora. The primary objective of Margaret’s Place is to provide a safe after-school enrichment opportunity for children living in the two Soledad Camps served by the Franciscan Workers. In addition to helping children with homework, learning to read, and an art club, individual home tutoring is also occasionally offered.
Camp St. Francis provides educational and recreational field trips for “disadvantaged” children living in Monterey County. Summer camp and other camping opportunities are also offered to these children. The children are showered with positive attention and affection, in accordance of our theme “You are special”.
Since 2005, we have also worked with neighborhood children in the Alisal area of Salinas, offering computer assistance and art projects on Saturdays. This was a natural outcropping of our Companions of the Way Community residence on Jefferson Street where neighborhood children showed an interest in the activities of the Community and a desire for weekend activities themselves. We currently serve 20 neighborhood youth with two volunteer adults from the Community.
Youth Alive needs Backpacks and School Supplies!
A great way to help poor families with children in Jimenez and Camphora
farm labor camps is to gift their children with backpacks and school
supplies. If you wish to help a
child get ready for the new school year, think of buying a few more of what
you’re already getting for your kids.
Or if you know a group that would like to help, please call
Jill at 578-4198 to get connected.
Guitars and drums needed
Youth Alive!, a Franciscan Worker outreach program serving children
in poverty for the last 25 years, is developing a music program based on
instrumental guitar performance and group drumming.
Our vision is a
culture of encouragement
which empowers and educates youth as they share the joy of music. In our
first year, we have held weekly group rhythm sessions in our two
Youth-Alive!-sponsored farm labor camps, taught individual guitar and drum
lessons to over twenty children, and performed publicly as well as for
special events at the camps.
Currently we are working with a
core group of
teens to master a rhythm and guitar curriculum, developed with the support
of faculty at California State University of Monterey Bay. These teens will
become certified teacher's assistants in the program as it develops!
We need
your help to make this vision
a reality! Currently we are accepting:
- New or Used Guitars: Classical (nylon-string)
guitar skills are the focus of our program, however we can also accept
acoustic (steel-string) or electric guitars/basses.
- Guitar cases
- Music accessories: Music stands, footstools
for guitar, metronomes, manuscript paper, pencils, tuning devices.
- Financial contributions are also certainly
appreciated.
Please contact Gregory Tippett (Youth
Alive! Music Coordinator) for more information at
651-925-6027, or
email Greg.
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HOW CAN YOU HELP?
DONATE or VOLUNTEER
POSSIBILITIES IN ACTION
Roberto’s story
My name is Roberto Chavez and I was born in a small village called Las Jicamas in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. It has over five thousand inhabitants and they all depend on the rainy season for sowing corn and beans. Every year many of the men of the village say good-bye to their families in the spring to work in El Norte, as they call the United States. For over 35 years, my father left the town during spring and returned early winter. He worked in the endless strawberry and lettuce fields in the Salinas Valley of California, leaving his wife and children behind.
My father came to the US in the fifties as a bracero worker, not because he wanted to, but be-cause of the situation his family lived in. Living in poverty, in an adobe house which he built with the ceiling almost falling on us, was not easy. During the rainy season, the house leaked like a colander. It was impossible to find a job in the village that would pay a good salary to feed a family of seven. These living conditions forced my father to
immigrate to El Norte.
For my father and my three older brothers the most significant benefit that they obtained by
coming to the US was the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 through which they obtained legal status in the United states. Thanks to the IRCA, in 1986 my father was granted legal residency. Now, my father did not have to risk his life crossing the Rio Bravo illegally to get to the United Sates.
On December 20, 1992, my journey to El Norte began. My father finally saved enough money to immigrate my family to California. Like most
immigrants we crossed the US-Mexican border illegally with the help of a coyote. It took us two intensive days to cross La Frontera. The border that once took my father away from my family now would no longer separate us. It was time to start a new life by celebrating Christmas Eve in Soledad,
California.
When I first came to the US, I had many fears. One of my fears was attending a new school and not being able to speak English. I still remember how confused and scared I was during my first week of school. My fears grew even greater after seeing how the Mexican-Americans discriminated against Mexicans. For the first time, I felt ashamed of my own people because Mexicans were fighting against other Mexican Americans. They called us different names like "mojados" (wetbacks). They thought they were better than Mexicans just because they were born in the US. I did not feel safe in school.
Learning English was not easy for me. When I was in school, I felt confused in class because I did not understand my teachers. For the first two months, I did not do my homework because the directions were all written in English and I did not know how to read in English. I wanted to go back to Las Jicamas where all the people were friendly with me. I wished I were in my old school where all my teachers spoke my language.
Living in an old bracero labor camp became an obstacle for me to learn English. All the
residents that live in the labor camps are farm workers who do not speak English. Sometimes, when I tried to practice my English skills with my friends, but they made fun of me because they said that I wanted to become a "gabacho," an Anglo. My friends did not understand that I wanted to succeed in life by speaking two languages.
It is sad to say, but in the past thirteen years only six teenagers that lived in the labor camps have graduated from high school and attended a college or a university. I am one of six teenagers who have graduated from high school and attended a four-year university. Almost thirty percent of the children that live in these two camps do not finish high school. Most of the students drop out of high school during their freshman or sophomore year to work in the fields with their parents.
Most of the children that live in the labor camps are not legal residents. I think they drop out of high school because they know that they cannot attend a university after graduating from high school. I was lucky to receive my green card right after
graduating from high school. Being a legal resident has opened a lot of doors for me.
Secondly, teenagers do not attend college after graduating from high school because their parents do not have money to pay for their education. Their parents work in the fields and they barely earn enough money to pay the house bills. Teenagers who are not legal residents cannot apply for
scholarships because they do not have a social security number. I have known a lot of people who have won a lot of scholarship money, but they cannot claim the money because they are illegal residents.
The Franciscan Workers in Salinas have been striving to do something to help migrant families at Jimenez and Camphora labor camps. They have seen the poverty in which these migrant families live. For many years they helped the families by giving them food and clothes. They also saw the necessity of having an after school program, "Margaret's Place," to help the children with their homework.
Margaret's Place invited college students to talk to the children at the labor camp about college. The Franciscan Workers knew that the children needed motivation and that the only way they were going to get it was through the voices of these college students.
They also saw the need of having a library at the camp, so they added a small library to the after school program. All the books were not new, but they were very educational and fun to read. I
personally enjoyed reading one or two books every day I attended the program. They also added a computer lab in the after school program (which is now a mobile computer lab). Thanks to them, my reading skills improved. Having computers at the after school program was great because sometimes we (the high school students) needed to use a computer to write our book reports or research papers. They also spent time playing soccer and baseball with us. I will never forget those years.
The Franciscan Workers also prepared educational field trips for the children during the year. For many years, I enjoyed attending all the different events and field trips that were organized for us. I never missed any of the educational field trips
because they always took us to very interesting places where I learned a lot. They also took us several times to Dorothy's Kitchen in Salinas to learn more about "service to others". I enjoyed these trips a lot because the homeless people that we served at Dorothy's Kitchen were very friendly and
interesting to talk to.
Most of the children that live in the labor camps work in the fields during their summer break. I started working in the fields when I was only
fourteen years old. I had to wake up at 4:30 AM in order to dress and help my mother prepare the meal for the day. We worked ten or twelve hours every day. My parents allowed me to work in the fields because they wanted me to experience how hard it was.
When I was in my junior year in high school, I decided that I wanted to attend college after finish-ing high school. I started investigating the different colleges and universities that were close to home because I did not want to go far away from my family. The university that I liked the most was Cal State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB). I chose this university because they have a great Liberal Studies Department for people who want to become teachers.
Currently, I am working for the Soledad Unified School District teaching at Frank LeDezma
Elementary School. After many years of hard work and the many challenges that I have overcome in my life, I have finally fulfilled my great dream. Now that I am a teacher, I want to help all those kids who live in the Soledad camps by helping them with their homework and by inspiring them to reach for their dreams.
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Daisy's Story
To find the beautiful and the sacred on the margins of society one must keep both mind and heart open. Camphora Camp is located on the edge of a dead end road next to Soledad Prison. The nondescript farm worker housing and gravel lot are just a blur to passerby on Highway 101. However, that was where we first met Daisy.
Daisy came to California at the age of fourteen, and was the first person in her family to attend high school in the United States. The challenges of a new school and learning in a new language were overwhelming, and she had no role models to follow. Her cousins around her age were dropping out of school and either getting married or working in the fields, but Daisy persevered and successfully graduated. After several trips to nearby community colleges and universities, Daisy found out she was accepted to California State University, Monterey Bay.
Now, nearly four years later, Daisy is set to graduate from CSUMB in June of this year. That very shy and timid youth we met years ago doing her homework on the kitchen table has blazed an inspirational trail for other girls in farm worker camps to follow. Daisy will frequently volunteer with us in our work with the children currently living in the camp where we met. Daisy's dreams include working with youth and advocating for girls and women.
