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Four
years ago Leticia Clausen, a teacher at Seattle's Denny Middle School,
noticed that a growing number of her mostly Latino students were
being left at home during the summer while their parents were at
work. She decided to take matters into her own hands.
"I have four kids, so I figured if I take four more kids to the
swimming pool or to the park it wouldn't cost me that much or be
that much more work," Clausen said. "If they stay home with nothing
to do there's a chance they're going to get into trouble."
After
a few summers of doing it on her own, and recognizing that the need
was continuing to grow, she turned to the school district and to
the City of Seattle for help. But, there was no program in place
to fill the need.
About
the same time Paul Gutierrez, chair of King County Cooperative Extension,
was talking to the City of Seattle about possible partnerships to
help extend 4-H programs to inner-city schools. Through the work
of Yvonne Sanchez, administrator for the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods,
a 4-H program for Latino youth, mostly Denny Middle School students,
was born.
Gutierrez
says the goal of the program is simple—Prevention.
"The idea is to target Latino youth at the middle school level when
they are most susceptible and engage them in productive activities,"
says Gutierrez. "Data increasingly shows that if we can avert risk
behavior at the middle school level the kids are much less prone
to risk activity in their high school years."
It's a multifaceted partnership in that it brings together resources
from the Seattle School District, the City of Seattle, and Washington
State University, enabling the hiring last year of Marina Espinoza
to bring the program together.
Espinoza,
whose family emigrated from Mexico when she was three years old,
grew up in a small farm community in Oregon and understands the
challenges faced by the young people in her program.
"The Hispanic community in Seattle has really grown in the last
five to eight years," she said. "Some kids in the program speak
only English, others only Spanish and some are bilingual, but they
all have their culture in common." In
keeping with 4-H tradition, leaders involve members in activities
and expose them to role models who show kids the possibilities
that exist in their own lives.
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| Boeing
engineer Jimmy Rojas of the Society of Hispanic Professional
Engineers lines up the target as Seattle Latino 4-H club member
Giovani Juarez (third from left) prepares to demonstrate the
can-crushing device built by his team. |
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Andres Martin, a University
of Washington senior in civil engineering and member of the
Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, gets help from Seattle
Latino 4-H club member Fernando Valiente in demonstrating how
a pulley works. |
For one session this summer, Espinoza recruited members of the
Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers to lead a workshop
for the club. The group, mostly comprised of engineers from Boeing
Corporation, explained basic tools like the lever, pulley, incline
plane, and fulcrum, bouncing deftly between English and Spanish.
They then divided the kids into five groups, handed each group
a box of "tools" and had them compete to use what they had just
learned to create and build a device to crush soda cans.
"Boeing really supports us and gives us the time to do this because
this may be where their next generation of engineers will come
from," engineer Jimmy Rojas explained against the backdrop of
weights dropping and cans crushing.
Gutierrez likes to hold up the collaboration that created the
Latino 4-H club as an example of how partnerships can bring together
resources from different sources to meet a community need.
"Sometimes
a partnership is a financial relationship, but others are simply
opportunities for groups to work together to achieve common goals,"
he said.
He points to the ongoing relationship that King County Cooperative
Extension has with the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation.
"We provide 4-H programs and activities at all their community
centers, and we have access to their facilities for our programs,"
Gutier-rez said. "My approach goes back to the roots of cooperative
extension.
We offer to bring to our partners the intellectual capital of
WSU and the skills of Cooperative Extension that they need to
achieve their goals."
As
part of King County's partnership strategy, 4-H faculty member
Carris Booker is implementing a community partnership development
action plan to bring 4-H programs to an even broader range of
at-risk youth, especially in urban communities.
The program is modeled after a successful 1995 pilot program Booker
put together in Texas before moving to Washington state.
"Our
objective is to strengthen and expand partnerships for 4-H with
community-based groups, faith-based groups, service organizations,
corporations and small businesses, schools, foundations, all levels
of government and even the media," Booker said. "The goal is simple,
and that's to develop new avenues of volunteer leadership for
4-H."
Booker
has found positive responses from his outreach effort and has
high hopes for replicating the program.
"It can be a model for strengthening 4-H in both urban and rural
communities across the state," Booker said. "In fact, I'd like
to see it become a national model."
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