HealthyCal.org

By Mary Flynn, California Health Report

The city of Richmond is attempting to pass a proposal that’s failed in big cities including New York City and Philadelphia – and if they succeed, their plan could encourage statewide changes in California.

The City Council is considering two ballot measures intended to combat child obesity. One would impose a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, and the other would earmark the soda-generated tax revenue to fund public health initiatives for the community.

“There’s a tremendous amount of momentum moving this forward,” said Richmond City Councilman Jeff Ritterman, “There’s a definite nexus between how many of these foods a child takes in and their likelihood of being obese.“

The correlation between sugar sweetened beverages and the national waistline has been a topic of much discussion in public health circles and is now popping up in legislative discussions.

Richmond’s measure proposes a 1-cent per ounce charge on sugar-sweetened beverages sold in the city.

Last February, Sacramento City Councilman member Kevin McCarty called for a city soda tax, but nothing more was done. Richmond is the first to have a city council ask city staff to draft an initiative for them to consider putting on the ballot.

The initiative comes on the heels of a disturbing report about obesity in Richmond. Contra Costa Health Services determined that a whopping 58% of Richmond adults were obese or overweight, racking up over $400 million in health care costs for the county each year.

The study also determined that 24% of the children in Richmond were obese (not just overweight), and if current health habits persist, that translates into a 42% obesity rate when these kids reach adulthood.

Public health officials determined that sugar-sweetened beverages are a major contributor to the obesity epidemic in America. Sugar-sweetened beverages are beverages with caloric sweeteners added to them – including soda, fruit juices, or energy drinks, but not diet drinks.

“I think we’re at the beginning of an important public conversation about the obesity epidemic,” said Harold Goldstein, Executive Director of the California Center for Public Health and Advocacy. “I don’t think most people know that a 20 ounce soda has 16 teaspoons of sugar, or that we consume 45 gallons of soda a year – that’s the equivalent of 42 pounds of sugar every year.”

“That’s how much my son weighed when he was five years old,” Goldstein said. “We’re all on average drinking a 5-year-old worth of sugar a year.”

An association of beverage producers says there is no clear connection between soda taxes and and lower rates of obesity.

“It’s not an effective means of addressing health and obesity,” said Karen Hanretty, a spokesperson for the American Beverage Association. She referred to data compiled by the Center for Disease Control that determined that sugar-sweetened beverages made up about 5.5% of the average American’s caloric intake. “A tax to address 5.5% of the average calories certainly isn’t going to make a significant impact,” she said.

She also referred to another study from George Mason University, which set out to determine whether a higher tax on soda would have an impact. Hanretty said the study determined that even by applying a 20% tax to these beverages, the lowest amount to create any effect, would reduce a person’s body mass by a trivial amount. “A soda tax simply has not been proved to have any sort of effect on public health,” she said.

Hanretty also pointed to West Virginia and Arkansas, two states who place an excise tax (applied to specific goods, not directly to the consumer) on sodas, but also consistently have high occurrences of obesity. “They rank upon the top states for obesity rates in the country, so there is no direct link between taxing and lowering obesity.”

Advocates of the “soda tax” point to the success of tobacco taxes in reducing smoking and other forms of tobacco consumption.

“[Tobacco] is a really good analogy with this,” Ritterman said. “Each product benefits a very small number of transnational corporations, neither product has any nutritional or health value, both products cause significant health problems and in both cases the cost of those health problems has socialized.”

“It’s not just borne by the those who use it,” Ritterman added, “but it’s society as a whole that pays the price.”

Although the idea that the tobacco tax alone that reduced consumption of tobacco products is debatable — research says a combination of factors were at play, including smoke-free establishments and dissemination of educational materials — consumption of tobacco has decreased significantly after the tax and revenues have been raised.

Data indicate that higher prices may also reduce soda consumption. A review conducted by Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity suggested that for every 10% increase in price, consumption decreases by 7.8%.

A recent study released by UCSF supports these claims. Researchers calculated that a one-cent-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages would reduce their consumption by about 15 percent in young people.

Given that right now Americans consume an average of 45 gallons of sugar sweetened beverages per person each year, this reduction, they concluded, would have a huge impact: approximately 867,000 fewer obese adults and a savings of over $17 billion in medical costs over a ten year period.

Different approaches exist in terms of how and to whom a soda tax should be applied. In February 2011, the California Center for Public Health and Advocacy worked with State Assemblymember Bill Monning to sponsor state legislation, AB669, which is currently under consideration in the State Assembly.

The bill proposes a penny-an-ounce tax on every soda and sugar-sweetened beverage sold in California. The bill proposes an excise tax, that is, the distributors would pay the tax to the government, in this case, the state. If successful the bill could raise $1.7 billion for childhood obesity programs in California.

Another suggestion is to tax the beverage manufacturers at the source, taxing them for the amount of caloric sweeteners added to beverages at the onset, say a tax per teaspoon of sugar added, rather than taxing the finished product. A recent study conducted by researchers at Iowa State University suggests this solution would be more effective for reducing their consumption by encouraging manufacturers to reduce their use of caloric sweeteners.

The study concluded that although a manufacturer could adjust the consumer price accordingly, it would have less of an impact to the consumer than taxing the finished product.

In Richmond, there’s much debate around the issue. Opponents to the proposed tax say it would encourage consumers to purchase their beverages outside the city limits, or that the soda tax is an elitist tax on the poor.

But Ritterman says he believes the lower income population will benefit the most: obesity numbers were highest among adults and children in low-income households.

“We are already paying a huge tax for the obesity epidemic,” Ritterman said. “It’s costing everybody a lot of money already that we’re not factoring into it, so I think the poor have the most to gain.”

If the California initiative were to pass, it would create a Children’s Health Promotion fund dedicated to childhood obesity programs and activities. Goldstein said there are approximately 20 states considering a soda tax.

Even if either initiative passes, Goldstein points out, reducing sugar-sweetened beverages is not a silver bullet to solve the obesity epidemic. “It’s not caused by a single source and it’s not going to have a have single solution.”

Ritterman agrees. “I think it’s only one part of what we need to do to deal with child obesity,” he said, adding that other issues like public safety in Richmond’s parks, or incorporating physical and nutrition education back into its schools were also key components.

However, bringing attention to the drawbacks of sugary beverages could help the public make better choices and a tax could offset the effects of sugar sweetened beverages on public health, Goldstein said.

“With that information, its important to then make a decision,” Goldstein said. “For each of us to ask ourselves, is it reasonable that that product include revenues to help solve the problem that the product is causing.”

Mary Flynn is a correspondent for the California Health Report at www.healthycal.org.

By Lynn Graebner

When the homicide rate in Salinas stood at four times the national average in 2009, local leaders decided enough was enough. In January of that year, Salinas joined forces with the county, law enforcement, faith-based organizations and local businesses to take aim at the gang-related violence plaguing the small city.

Three years later, the Community Alliance for Safety and Peace (CASP) was 167 members strong with a program to save lives in Salinas – and no money to implement the plan.

“If we wait around for funding, kids are going to die,” said Kelly McMillin, Deputy Chief of Police for the City of Salinas and a steering committee member of CASP. “We’ll fight it with what we have.”

Monterey County leads the state in youth homicides, according to a recent analysis by the Violence Policy Center. Last year saw a record low number of shootings in Salinas – 49 – but the average number of shootings annually from 2003-2010 is 145 a year, according to analysis by the Monterey Herald. About 150,000 people live in the small city.

To tackle the problem, the city is pooling existing resources, forming alliances with residents and forging ahead anyway, drawing on whatever local, county and federal resources they can to fund their Comprehensive Strategy for Community-wide Violence Reduction.

They are finding partners in unlikely places.

The Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, for instance, is working with the Salinas Police Department on a pro bono basis to apply counterinsurgency campaign techniques to gang violence problems in Salinas.

“One of the main theories in counterinsurgency is the government needs to meet the basic needs of the residents,” said Georgina Mendoza, the Community Safety Director for Salinas and Chair of the CASP Steering Committee.

What that looks like on the domestic level is infrastructure and community building, empowering neighbors, graffiti and weed abatement, organizing neighborhood leadership and educating people about services available at the city, county and state levels, McMillin said.

Another counterinsurgency theory is that law enforcement needs to be approachable and needs to make residents their allies, Mendoza said.

In order to build that trust, CASP is starting with one neighborhood, Hebbron Heights, which has two rival gangs, one of the highest poverty and housing density levels and lowest education and literacy levels in the city.

The police department has agreed to dedicate four officers specifically to Hebbron. That’s not an easy contribution to make after losing 40 officers in the last three years due to budget cuts. And that’s in a county with two state prisons, 71 gangs, and 5,000 gang members and their affiliates. About 3,000 of them live in Salinas, states the CASP strategy document.

A little relief came late last year when the U.S. Department of Justice, through its Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, granted Salinas $2.83 million to hire eight new officers. Two of them are already on the street in Hebbron, often patrolling on foot, and it’s starting to pay off.

For instance, Salinas police recently arrested a man in his home in front of his children. The next day, CASP officers went to the home to talk to the reluctant wife. They listened to her concerns and explained why force was used in the arrest, McMillin said. Noticing empty liquor bottles in the house, they offered her counseling services for alcohol abuse and for the children. She accepted the offer, an establishment of trust that led to her telling the officers about a man who rides his bicycle around the neighborhood drunk, making her children fearful to play outside.

On their way out, the officers spotted the man.

“That probably never would have come up on our radar otherwise,” McMillin said.

Now the kids in the neighborhood recognize the CASP cops and come out to chat with them and seek them out when they have problems like bullying, Mendoza said.

“All of a sudden they become my cop, my officer,” she said

The CASP officers have an office in the Hebbron Family Center, run by Salinas Parks and Community Services. As Part of CASP’s pilot there, 14 agencies will provide services. The Salinas Public Library is setting up computers at the center and will provide programs including digital arts. Nonprofit Rancho Cielo will provide free and low-cost training in construction and the culinary arts. The Monterey County Public Health Department will make a public nurse available for 4-5 hours a week. And the Sun Street Center will offer services for drug and alcohol addiction and teaching parenting skills, Mendoza said.

To foster the flow of communication between residents CASP has also organized “charlas,” Spanish for chats. Two Friday evenings a month Hebbron neighbors meet with CASP representatives.

At first, CASP members brought the food and provided the space.

“Now the residents are saying, ‘Don’t bring your food, we have better food and we’ll decide where to meet,’” Mendoza said. They’re coming up with their own agendas, becoming more outspoken, inviting their family and friends and wanting to hear from “their” CASP officers, she said.

In the spring of 2010, CASP hosted 23 “listening sessions” where they asked about 200 Salinas residents about needs and problems in their neighborhoods.

CASP now holds quarterly meetings, called Community Dialogs for Change, updating residents and getting feedback from them. One hundred to 200 residents attend those, Mendoza said. And CASP is now organizing an all-day summit called For Our Future on Mar. 3 with speakers and workshops.

CASP members hope informing residents about available services and bringing community members together will inspire residents to take action in their neighborhoods and find their own leaders.

“It might be that very determined young single mom who just wants her kids to be safe,” Mayor Donohue said.

“The whole vision is to come together, pour resources into an area and have a passing of the baton to the community leaders. Then we’d move to another area, taking back Salinas area by area,” said Gary Vincent, Director of Alternative Programs for the Monterey County Office of Education and a member of the CASP steering committee.

One of the strategies Salinas police are employing to take back neighborhoods is Operation Ceasefire. Launched in 2010 police held call-ins where they recruited gang members to come, often as an obligation of parole. They were offered job training, employment placement services and drug and alcohol abuse counseling.

The poor economy left little funding for the program in 2011. As of Dec. 31, the Governor’s Office of Gang and Youth Violence Policy was shuttered due to budget cuts.

But McMillin said his department is gearing up for another Ceasefire call despite the cuts in funds, possibly in February.

This year with fewer employment opportunities to offer, the police plan to approach gang members from a moral perspective, McMillin said.

“Even the most hard core gang members would rather not be in that lifestyle,” he said. “They just don’t know the way out.”

For those gang members who refuse help from Ceasefire, police vow to crack down heavily on them and their gangs if they commit another crime. That can include incarceration far from home and police sweeps of their gangs.

“We work very closely with the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” Mendoza said. “They’re very supportive.”

Federal law enforcement agencies also support Monterey County. In April of 2010, 250 local, state and federal law enforcement officers cooperated in Operation Knockout, arresting 34 gang members and gang associates on suspicion of trafficking narcotics and weapons.

Although state funding for the battle against gangs is dwindling, the Federal Bureau of Investigations has committed agents to work in Monterey County, McMillin said. They are part of the new Law Enforcement Operations Center in Salinas occupied at the end of 2011. McMillin estimates it will house about 26 people and and he hopes to see it fully staffed by this spring.

Shootings in Salinas fell from 151 in 2009 to 131 in 2010 and to 49 last year. Homicides dropped from 29 in 2009 to 20 in 2010 and 12 last year.

“That leads me to believe that efforts on the whole are having an impact,” McMillin said.

To market its services to the public, a CASP subcommittee has formed a campaign called For Our Future. They are producing posters, stickers, t-shirts and a website listing services available to residents. CASP enlisted local teens to talk to businesses on Alisal and Market Streets in East Salinas about the campaign. The next day there was a poster in every window, Mendoza said.

Salinas radio station La Buena 103.5 FM, has donated 30 minutes of air time to CASP every Wednesday morning to host speakers from local community service agencies.

As a result of that relationship, Paco Jacobo, general manager of Radio Campesina ,another popular station in town, called Mendoza to offer his assistance. Mendoza told him about a group of young people who had been talking to Mayor Donohue about pursing musical careers. Jacobo offered the free use of a music studio. Those 30 teens will now get experience working with musical equipment, computers and music professionals, Mendoza said.

Faith-based organizations are also supporting and organizing local kids in educational and recreational activities.

Pastor Frank Gomez of the East Salinas Family Center, a United Methodist Church, is on the CASP executive committee and leads the Mayor’s Clergy Council, a group of about 18 interfaith leaders.

“What we’re working on now is becoming familiar with the risk factors and the protective factors that influence what kids do,” he said. “If we know what those risk factors are that should challenge the faith community to do something about it,” Gomez said.

His church is already doing something. Four days a week, about 50 second through seventh graders come to the church after school for tutoring by volunteer high school students and recreational time. It’s free, and the church partners with 11 schools that refer students to the program.

“We give up our facility four days a week, but it’s a no brainer for me,” Gomez said.

Members of the Mayor’s Clergy Council are also currently doing an inventory of available space they have so that more of these types of programs can develop.

After more than 50 years of gang development in Salinas it’s going to take some time to break that cycle. But members of CASP and others are committed to the goal of a peaceful community.

“We’ve not taken our eye off the ball, Mayor Donohue said. “Nobody’s under any illusions. There’s a shark in the water,” he said.

By Jenn Walker

Ysidro Avila rummages through a tote bag and begins spreading packets of seeds out on the coffee table.

“One of my favorites is Salvia hispanica or Salvia columbariae, which is the chia seed,” he says. “I have a winter spinach, which is an organic giant version of spinach.”

The list of the bag’s contents continues. Blue hopi corn seeds, organic alfalfa seeds, heirloom red kidney seeds, heirloom oat and wheat seeds, jolokia pepper seeds, cauliflower, oregano, parsley, brussel sprouts, radishes, spaghetti squash, more than 100,000 tomato seeds… Just when it seems like he’s finished, he lists more.

These seeds are part of Avila’s massive contribution to a nonprofit organization in Sacramento, which is in the process of creating a free seed library open to the public. The goal is redistribution of seeds to the community, specifically seeds that have known and documented origins.

At the most basic level, Liberation Permaculture’s seed library provides the community an ongoing supply of seeds to use for growing their own food. A seed library has the capability to feed hundreds, even thousands, of people through a low- to no-cost process, Liberation Permaculture founder Rafael Aguilera says. This is especially significant for ‘food deserts’, where fresh food access is limited. Many of these seeds will bear plants with medicinal properties, too, he adds.

Here in Sacramento, providing the community seeds with known origins empowers locals to know their produce and share their knowledge communally.

“When someone has a relationship with their food, it should start with the seed and it should end with the seed,” he says. “We don’t want to be pessimists, we don’t want to be doomsday about it, but we really feel like if we’re going to be a resilient community, we need to define our own food system and participate in it.”

So Aguilera, along with the others in Liberation Permaculture, is encouraging the community to collect and plant organic, heirloom seeds. They consider any seeds that have been genetically unique for at least 50 years heirlooms. These seeds should also be able to openly pollinate, or reproduce on their own. The group is prepared to teach people how to garden.

“We’re going to teach people how to garden in a very hyperlocal way, whether it is in their own backyard, [on] their own balcony or [in] their own abandoned lot,” he says.

Another driving motive behind the seed library, he says, is to provide the community with a means to push back against crops derived from genetically-modified organisms, or GMOs.

According to him, the Central, San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys are in the midst of what he calls a “genetic warzone”.

“The valley, being a large region and having thousands and thousands of different crops growing, is literally a warzone of genetic pollution for heirloom and indigenous, open-pollinated, local seeds,” he says.

A number of experiments are occurring in these areas using genetically-modified seed stock, he says, in attempts to create a resilient tomato, seeds integrated with pharmaceutical drugs, or plants with the cold-tolerance of a cod, by crossing two species.

His concern is that these genetically-modified varieties can in turn cross-pollinate with other indigenous varieties, creating what he and others call “genetic pollution”. Even in remote regions of Mexico, genetic pollution has been traced by biologists like Ignacio Chapela, he points out.

“We think that the genetic diversity of our food is as important as the cultural diversity of our people,” Aguilera says.

Within the last seven years, controversy has increased in California regarding GMOs. In March 2004, Mendocino County was the first in the nation to pass a ban on cultivating genetically-modified plants or animals within its jurisdiction. Butte, Humboldt, Marin and San Luis Obispo counties followed suit by placing similar measures on 2004 ballots, though Marin was the only county where an anti-GMO initiative passed.

To date, there are no proven health risks from consumption of GMO crops; however, the scientific community has raised concerns that GMOs may be the cause of allergies and other aggravations in humans.

“If they want to create science in a lab, then go ahead and do that in a lab,” Ysidro says. “But don’t feed all of America with that.”

Stephen Kaffka is an agronomist who has been teaching in the plant sciences department at UC Davis for close to 20 years. He has somewhat of a different perspective on the issue, suggesting that heirloom varieties ought not to be pitted against GMO varieties.

Some heirloom varieties are contaminated with bacterial infections, he points out.

“There’s nothing wrong with growing heirloom varieties, [planting them] is a fun thing to do,” he says. “[But] what makes the genes in [heirloom varieties] less polluting than the genes in, let’s say commercial tomato varieties or corn?” he asked.

“We have an urban world that we live in, it’s not likely that everyone can grow their own food,” he adds.

For those who do want to grow their own food, however, the seed program offers the community a choice to grow heirloom, open-pollinated plants if they choose.

“Fresh backyard produce is incredible, nutrient-wise and everything else,” Avila says. “And you know where it’s coming from and you don’t have to worry about what you’re feeding your family or your kids, or [what you are] putting in your own body.”

Because this program is run on a volunteer-basis, recruiting people to contribute time, money and seeds is an ongoing process, Aguilera says. The organization has been collecting and categorizing seeds since last spring.

So far more than 100 people have participated, either by taking or contributing seeds.

Avila is one of those contributors. He caught wind of Liberation Permaculture’s efforts through some friends, and decided he wanted to help. He has purchased more than 10 pounds of heirloom seeds to contribute to the library. As an indigenous food enthusiast, he is just that passionate about the issue, he says.

“It really dawned on me how far and how detached we really are as a society from our food in the grand scale of things,” he says. “We get so caught up in our everyday lives [that] we don’t question our food or where it comes from.”

Ideally, he says he would love to create a similar model in Stockton, where he is originally from, and establish a seed library network linked between Sacramento, Stockton, the East Bay and surrounding areas.

On Feb. 7, the Liberation Permaculture is organizing an introductory workshop to sustainable gardening. At this time the seeds will be disbursed from the seed lending library.

“Obviously we won’t be charging any late penalty fees,” Aguilera says with a laugh. Instead, the only expectation of anyone who takes seeds is that they save any seeds they can collect from successful harvests and replenish the library’s stock.

The organization is exploring the possibility of a partnership with the city’s public libraries on this project. If the partnership succeeds, Aguilera hopes to spread seed lending libraries to all of the public libraries in the city, beginning with those located in food deserts.

“Giving people access to that knowledge, basically, that’s stored in the seed itself, its genetic knowledge, is powerful,” Aguilera says. “Seeds are our ancestors and they are what our future depends on.”

By Genevieve Bookwalter

The lone shelter for domestic violence victims in one of the state’s poorest counties has turned away a growing number of mothers and children over the past three years, reflecting a state and national trend as demand for services grows but funding becomes harder to find.

“It seems pretty obvious to us pretty recently that things were growing,” said Justin Red, spokesman for Marjaree Mason Center in Fresno. In 2008-09, the center turned away 63 adults and 68 kids; in 2009-10 workers turned away 76 adults and 98 children; and in 2010-11 they turned away 86 adults and 105 children.

The center never turns someone away without giving that person another place to go, like a hotel or a shelter in another county, Red said. But the 100-bed center keeps a regular waiting list.

Fresno County is no stranger domestic violence problems. According to the California Department of Justice, Fresno County reported the fourth-highest number of domestic violence calls in all California counties in 2009, the most recent figures available. Per capita, nearly 1 in 100 Fresno residents reported domestic violence, with 8,205 calls for help.

Red said his center does a large amount of outreach, so some calls could come because more women know services are available. But Fresno has nearly 250,000 residents, or 26.8 percent, living in poverty and 15.7 percent unemployment, according to federal and state figures. The correlation between high poverty and unemployment rates and a large number of domestic violence calls is impossible to ignore, Red said.

“I absolutely think it is related,” Red said.

Statistics show a similar trend across California.

Statewide, 16.3 percent of California residents lived in poverty in 2010, up from 15.3 percent the year before, according to the U.S. Census. The state’s unemployment rate in November was 11.3 percent.

According to Camille Hayes, spokeswoman with the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, 84 percent of the state’s domestic violence shelters reported an increased demand for services in 2010. Meanwhile, 88 percent reported a drop in funding.

The California Partnership to End Domestic Violence advocates on behalf of domestic violence shelters and service providers around the state.

“In a recession, individual donations dry up and foundation money is harder to come by,” Hayes said. “The economic outlook in California is very grave, and this has had an impact on domestic violence service providers.”

Meanwhile Hayes said her group is keeping a close eye on the state’s budget, which in Gov. Jerry Brown’s latest revision still contained $20.6 million for domestic violence shelter funding.

That’s an improvement over 2009, when then-Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed $20.4 million in state money for the shelters. The money wasn’t restored until late 2010.

Many groups depend on that government money to carry on; for example, state and federal funds last year made up more than $1.4 million of the Marjaree Mason Center’s $3.3 million budget, according to the group’s federal tax statement.

Cindy Southworth, vice president with the National Network to End Domestic Violence in Washington D.C., said she is watching trends similar to California’s play out across the country.

Problems can grow as abusers take out their economic frustrations on partners or family, Southworth said. In addition, if an abuser loses his job and is home during the day, the victim loses what might have been a safe time by herself.

“A good economy doesn’t end abuse and a bad economy won’t cause domestic violence to occur in a healthy relationship,” Southworth said. “However, a bad economy flames existing abuse and increases demand for services at the very time that shelters and programs are struggling to stay alive in the midst of extreme budget cuts.”

Red said the Marjaree Mason Center is tapping individual donors and foundations and has continued offering the services many women depend on. The center should open a new shelter in Clovis this year, largely through community contributions. However, he said, raising money remains a worry.

“As far as concerns for our agency, funding is our top concern. Always,” Red said.

Last year the shelter provided 900 clients with a place to sleep and served a total of 4,500 people, Red said. Services included counseling, legal assistance and support groups, among others. That’s up from 3,900 clients served the year before, but similar to about 4,500 clients served three years ago, he said.

The nation’s ongoing economic woes have former Marjaree Mason clients concerned for women following in their footsteps.

Darlene Montoya, 53, of Reedley lived with her son in a Marjaree Mason Center shelter from November 2005 to January 2007, she said. During that time she returned to school and earned an Associate of Science degree at Reedley College. She now works as an administrative assistant with the Greater Reedley Chamber of Commerce.

Montoya said she fears that proposed cuts to government social services — like subsidized housing and day care for the poor — will hurt not only women making their immediate escape from an abusive relationship, but those who have left and are learning skills to create a new life.

“It’s going to make it harder for the women to get back on their feet,” Montoya said. “If you have no day care, how do you go to work? If you don’t have the housing, where are you going to live?”

By Minerva Perez, California Health Report

People fill out paperwork while their appointment with the Mexican Consulate's consulado movil Saturday, Dec. 3, in Planada. The consulate issued 500 matricula cards and passports during their two-day visit.

Getting to big cities is hard for many of the Mexican nationals living in parts of California’s Central Valley – but documents that make everyday life possible for immigrants in the U.S. require a trip to the Mexican embassy in Sacramento, Fresno or San Francisco.

Enter the Consulado Móvil, which allows the Fresno office of the Mexican Consulate to meet people halfway. The mobile consulate office issues passports and matricula cards, the official consulate ID for Mexicans living abroad.

“We are very aware of the effort to go to Fresno,” Vice-Consul Lluvia Ponce said at a recent móvil visit to a housing project in Planada, an unincorporated town of Merced County, an hour away from the Consulate.

More than 200 people waited in line the first week of December for their appointment for documents, and 300 more had appointments scheduled the next Sunday, Ponce said.

As people chatted while waiting in line, inside the community center of the housing project consulate workers took photographs and fingerprints. Because the computers are connected to Mexican databases, a matricula card can be issued in just 20 minutes.

A matricula card is proof of the record of the person in the registry of the Consulate. It’s also an acceptable identification card for almost all authorities, accepted in banks in cities and counties throughout California and the United States. While it’s useful in transactions like opening bank accounts, a marticula card is neither a driver’s license nor a migration document.

The Consulado Móvil service in Fresno has been around for several years. Recently, however, staff decided to diversify the cities they visit, to reach populations that are not making it to their usual stops, “especially for people who work in the fields and might not have the time to go,” Ponce said.

AnaLaura Navarette Ramirez, 30, had made the trip to Fresno before. When she called for information on renewing her husband’s matricula card, the Mexitel staff mentioned the December movil visit to Planada.

“It’s better for us to be here,” Navarette Ramirez said in Spanish. “Fresno is much further away for us.”

Ramirez, who is originally from Michoacan, was waiting for her husband’s appointment to finish. Her husband would have to take off a day of work if they go to Fresno, but with the móvil, he only had to take off half a day.

“If they ask for another document, it’s easier for us to go back to Merced to find it,” she said.

There are 10 consulate offices in California, and they all do the Consulado Móvil. On the same day of the Planada móvil visit, the Sacramento office visited Ceres in Stanislaus County and they have plans to stop by Patterson, Modesto, Riverbank and Turlock also in Stanislaus County in the new year, according to Sacramento-based Vice Consul Andrea Lopez de Leon Ibarra.

Yamilet Valladoild, site supervisor for El Concilio’s Modesto office, said 435 people were issued passports or matricula cards during the consulado movil visit.

El Concilio, a community organization serving the Spanish-speaking residents of San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties, has partnered with the Sacramento consulate office to bring their services to underserved communities.

Valladoild said she and her colleagues help find a location to hold the movil, provide the volunteers and promote the event.

“We feel it is vital to bring these resources to the community so we help in any way,” she wrote in an email.

Aside from visiting Stanislaus County three times a year, the consulado movil is at El Concilio’s Stockton office every Wednesday.

“They are very appreciative that they don’t have to drive all the way to Sacramento as some may not have reliable transportation or may lack Drivers Licenses,” Valladoild said.

The need for consulate visits is ever expanding as the number of people of Mexican origin living in California increases.

There are about 4.3 million Mexican-born individuals living in California according to the 2010 Census, of those Ponce said 1.8 million reside in the eight counties the Fresno consulate serves (Merced, Mariposa, Kings, Fresno, Madera, Tulare, Inyo, Kern) and just under 1 million reside in the 24 counties the Sacramento office serves.

“We are being proactive to reach out to these people,” Ponce said.

Aside from matricula cards and passports, the consulado móvil offers other types of information on the various social, legal and health services available to them and their American-born children, if they have any. There is also information on how registration to vote for Mexico’s 2012 presidential election from the United States.

For people who missed out on the Planada event, there will be other visits to nearby towns and the Fresno office always takes appointments through Mexitel.

“People come to expect us coming here, and they always come with a great attitude to them,” Ponce said.

Minerva Perez is a correspondent for the California Health Report at www.healthycal.org

By Brenda Duran, California Health Report

The future of the national economy has been on the minds of school officials at Long Beach City College.

In planning for the future, school officials analyzed their fastest growing student population – Latinos. These students, they noted, play a critical role in boosting and maintaining a viable economy for the future, but first they must succeed through higher education interventions.

LBCC recently announced that the school would be able to accomplish this goal by embarking on a new initiative to focus on increasing student college access with the help of Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation.

The Lumina Foundation, a private independent foundation, is giving Long Beach City College $600,000 to launch a four-year partnership at the campus that will help more Latinos have college access and resources. The foundation is known for promoting its goal of increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials to 60 percent by 2025.

A total of 12 sites in 10 states were selected for the grant, and LBCC was one of two sites selected in California.

LBCC president Eloy Ortiz Oakley said this grant would serve as a building block for the college to help boost programs already in place such as its “College Promise” program that helps students’ transition to other higher education campuses among other benefits such as community partnerships.

“I think the important thing is that we don’t want this to be about one grant, this is about building infrastructure that will help these students go forward,” said Oakley. “This is not a one shot deal, this is about helping these students who are going through a public education system and ensure they have the opportunity to succeed and get a post-secondary education.”

Oakley said the college is currently working on coming up with a prescriptive model that they will present to the Lumina Foundation later this summer. The model will focus on addressing the issues that often stand in the way of Latino students achieving success.

“The data has shown us that lack of institutional knowledge that exists in longtime generations is not there for Latino students,” said Oakley. “There is disinformation as to how to go onto higher education. There exist barriers in how to afford their education by providing private information in financial aid forms and there seems to be lacking preparation for coursework, particularly in remedial Math and English.”

These issues are critical when it comes to building a strong workforce for the future, Oakley noted.

Latinos not only represent the largest and fastest growing population in the United States, but are also expected to make up half of the nation’s workers by 2025, according the Pew Research Center. In Long Beach, Latinos now make up 41 percent of the population.

“This is no longer a moral argument; Latinos will be the largest demographic group in our workforce,” said Oakley.

“We must, as educators, be able to teach the skills necessary for them to navigate through the workforce. They need education to survive. If we don’t provide a workforce that is competitive, everyone will suffer.”

In the coming year, the college hopes to implement a few strategies to get Latino students on the right track. Some of those include requiring four years of math and English and offering a free semester with guidance on what courses they have to take and guaranteeing those classes will be made available.

With the Lumina Foundation backing its goals, college officials are also planning on working with other local organizations that can help them reach more Latino students such as Long Beach non-profit organization Centro CHA (Community Hispanic Association).

Centro CHA Executive Director Jessica Quintana said she is ready to lend LBCC a helping hand in boosting success rates for Latino students.

Quintana’s organization currently works with local Latino youth ages 14-24 by providing career development, job training, tutoring and college and financial aid guidance.

“We are pleased that our local college district has the foresight to reach out to community partners,” said Quintana. “Our expectation is to really have our college district improve Latino student success and increase the transfer and graduation rates by working together.”

Oakley said he hopes Latino students on his campus get excited about having additional resources to succeed with this new partnership.

“I hope we get to a point where its not just celebrating the 10 Latino students who made it to a big university or Ivy League school and we begin to expect that the majority of those students graduate and move on to a secondary education,” said Oakley. “We want to see that it’s not the exception to the rule that these Latino students succeed – it is the rule that they succeed and that the exception is that they don’t.”

Brenda Duran is a correspondent for the California Health Report at www.healthycal.org.

Women’s fund grant will cover all costs for six people

By Melissa Flores, California Health Report

A new training program for medical interpreters is giving low-income women the skills needed for a hard-to-fill job – working as medical interpreters in indigenous languages.

Six medical interpreters will be taught to work with patients who speak indigenous languages from the Oaxacan region of Mexico, including the languages of Triqui, Mixteco and Zapotec, by the staff of the Natividad Medical Center in Salinas.

Linda Ford, the president and CEO of the Natividad Medical Foundation, said the group will try to recruit women who are trilingual in English, Spanish and an indigenous language.

“This has been a significant challenge here,” Ford said of the need for indigenous medical interpreters.

“The training trains interpreters to actually take cultural aspects into the medical care,” Ford said. “That is why it is so vital. We are not asking a family member, but someone who is trained with medical terminology.”

The Natividad Medical Foundation received a $25,000 grant through the Community Foundation for Monterey County’s Women’s Fund. The grant will cover stipends, transportation, books, and assistance with childcare for the participating women. The goal is that the women who complete training will be hired on a part-time or consultation basis to work with the hospital.

“We know that when women thrive, families thrive, and when families are healthy, communities flourish,” said Julie Drezner, the Community Foundation’s vice president of grants and programs. “These grants will help low-income women on the road to economic self-sufficiency by supporting post-secondary education, financial literacy and business development.”

The Women’s Fund gave out $225,000 total in grants to Natividad and other agencies that support women’s development in Monterey County.

The grant money will allow the women to complete a six-month internship at Natividad hospital, where Victor Sosa is the language access coordinator. He is certified to train new interpreters and has been working as a health care interpreter since the 1990s.

He said the hospital uses in-person interpreters as well as the Health Care Interpreter Network, which allows interpreters from 16 partner hospitals to talk with patients via live video feed. He said the main languages used are Spanish and sign language, but the network has interpreters who can speak up to 120 languages. He said with indigenous languages, people often speak different dialects so the staff has learned to ask a patient which town they come from in Mexico so that they can get the best interpreter.

“This developed to cut down on wait time, but also because it is more cost effective,” Sosa said, of the live video network. “We pay for the time we use it rather than searching for an interpreter and paying.”

Sosa said when Natividad’s interpreters work over the live video feed with other network hospitals, Natividad receives credit for when they need to use it. They also have a phone conference, which allows a doctor to talk to an interpreter over the phone who then relays information to a patient.

Sosa said that medical interpretation does more than just translate words from one language to another. His staff are trained to do what he calls a “speak back.”

“Many say yes because they are very compliant or meek when they are given instructions even if they don’t understand,” Sosa said of the indigenous population. “If they can’t articulate it back to the doctor, the staff has to repeat it or get language assistance.”

He said that in addition to knowing the language, interpreters have to develop their short-term memory and listening skills.

“They have to relay that information into the target language with accuracy,” he said.

The training class will also teach the interpreters about the ethics involved, such as patient confidentiality and limited advocacy. Sosa said the students are taught not to try to influence a patient or doctor’s decision unless they believe there is a life-threatening situation or the patient’s dignity would be affected.

“We want to support the women so they can get a skill and do everything they need to support people in our community,” Ford said. “We want to do what it takes to help us get the best possible, safest medical care (to patients.)”

Ford and Peter Chandler, a doctor on staff, said that it can be difficult to find someone who can translate the indigenous languages.

Chandler is the service director for women’s services at Natividad Medical Center, and a member of the board for the hospital’s foundation.

“It’s a huge deal for us,” Chandler said, of receiving the grant. “It will make a big impact for our community as well.”

He said there is a small pocket of indigenous residents who live around the King City and Greenfield area, who come to the Salinas hospital, especially for obstetrics/gynecology needs

“It is not a huge group of people, but it has a huge impact on our system when they come in,” Chandler said. “They don’t just speak a different language, but they have a different culture.”

He described the culture as very matriarchal, noting that sometimes the women will have an older female family member come in to the hospital with them.

“When they come in for labor, they are very suspicious of us to begin with,” he said. “If we end up having a problem with the baby, and we need to keep it on a monitor or they need a c-section, we need to be able to counsel them and give the risks and benefits.”

Chandler said that now they often try to explain what is going on with a husband or family member who might speak some Spanish.

“We want our patients to trust us and have confidence in what we are telling them,” Chandler said. “We want them to take a recommendation and explain what is going on with the baby…It is less traumatic in the clinic with any type of medical problem (with an interpreter.)”

Medical interpreters take into account cultural differences, grade level and communication differences.

“It takes a lot of time to have to run around and find interpreters,” Chandler said. “During the day we can usually find someone – it just takes time. But at night it can be really hard. There’s just not that many people around that are actually fluent and trilingual.”

One of the solutions the staff has used is to have an interpreter explain any possible side effects that might come up before hand in the clinic during the day. But the grant will allow the group to have interpreters who are available at any time.

“Excellent communication throughout the hospital is a priority,” Chandler said.

By Heather Gilligan, California Health Report

Twenty-year-old Sean Shavers sat, composed, in front of an overflowing auditorium at the Elihu Harris State Building in Oakland last week. To his right sat several members of the California Assembly, and to his left noted local leaders.

Today, Shavers is a multimedia producer for New American Media, but a few years ago, aged 17, he was a youth offender at Camp Sweeny, a juvenile facility in Alameda County. A program there helped him secure a high school diploma and a job when he was released. With help, Shavers said, he turned his life around in a big way.

Shavers was testifying at the Assembly Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color in California. The committee is holding meetings throughout the state like the Jan. 20 hearing in Oakland, to hear testimony about programs and policies that might help address the challenges faced by young men of color like Shavers.

The challenges are significant, according to fact sheets handed out at the meeting. African American males comprised 66 percent of homicide victims in Alameda County in 2010, and 73 percent of homicide victims were men of color. African American men are by far the likeliest to be incarcerated in California. The wealth and employment gap between white men and men of color is also large, with Latinos making $16,635 a year on average, for instance, compared to white men’s average earnings of $45,071 a year.

“This is a rescue mission,” said Assemblyman Sandre Swanson, chair of the assembly committee.

“Last year in the city of Oakland we lost 110 lives of young men and boys of color,” Larry Reid, Oakland’s city council president, told the committee. “We cannot lose any more young men, not just here in the city of Oakland, but throughout the state.”

“Your zip code changes your life,” said Dr. Anthony Iton, senior vice president at The California Endowment and former public health director for Alameda County.

Life expectancy in impoverished West Oakland, he noted, is fifteen years less than life expectancy in the wealthier, whiter Oakland hills area.

“How do you use public systems to interrupt that predictability?” asked Tony Smith, superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District.

Changing the circumstances that hurt boys and men of color means holding systems accountable, Smith and other speakers said. Smith, for instance, wants the OUSD to be the lead agency that cuts the youth incarceration rate in half in five years.

Speakers also emphasized the need to redirect existing resources to address the crisis facing young men and boys of color, particularly to match young people with jobs and keep jobs in disadvantaged communities.

About $23 million a year goes to a few Oakland neighborhoods where most of the city’s crime and violence is concentrated, Iton said.

The money, he added, funds nurses, probation officers, social workers and other service providers. Most of those people, Iton said, “go home to Concord at 4:30.”

Iton suggested redirecting that money to fund neighborhood residents to implement best practices in their own community.

Fifty percent of African American men in East Oakland are unemployed, noted Olis Simmons, president and CEO of Youth Uprising, a community center for teens in East Oakland.

Both Iton and Alex Briscoe, director of the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency, touted a program at Camp Sweeny that trained youth to work as Emergency Medical Technicians. Two cohorts of youth have trained as EMTs in the past year, and almost all were placed in jobs.

The most recent cohort of 22 students stood up, at Briscoe’s request, to thunderous applause from the packed auditorium.

“We did not operate from a deficit frame,” Briscoe said of the training’s success so far, noting that local emergency medical services needed more workers and more diversity in their workforce, and that the EMT program filled that need.

“There is no reason every county cannot have this program,” Briscoe said.

The human resources lost to poor education, high rates of unemployment and high rates of violence hurt the whole country, not just disadvantaged communities, Simmons of Youth Uprising said.

At the high school next door to Youth Uprising, Simmons said, 96.4 percent of kids are not proficient in math, yet future American jobs will be concentrated in technology – without enough skilled American workers to fill them.

Making sure that youth stay in school is more than just a way to keep economic engines churning – it is also one of the best ways of reducing violence and involvement in the criminal justice system, said Fania Davis, executive director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth.

“Keeping kids in school is the strongest factor in violence prevention,” she noted. Suspensions increase the likelihood of dropping out, and dropping out in turn increases the risk of incarceration.

The promise of education as an equalizing force has been broken in recent decades in the U.S. by harsh discipline focused on punishment rather than problem solving, Davis said.

“My school looks like a prison,” said Roy Ramos, a 17-year-old senior at Fremont High School, just before Davis spoke.

“Education has become a machine of inequality because of the police presence,” Davis said.

Davis and others spoke of the traumatic impact of punitive policies and the effects of violence in poor communities. “We become a culture of harmed people,” Davis said.

“What we are talking about healing from are some deep race and class-based inequalities,” said OUSD Superintendent Tony Smith. Smith, who is white, along with other speakers, noted that the room was filled with talented people motivated to take on these daunting problems – and that almost everyone in the room was a person of color.

That history of inequality is in part what makes solving the problems of boys and men of color so difficult, despite the many solutions and resources discussed at the event, speakers said.

“This is a struggle for equity,” Iton said, “and that means it is a struggle for power.”

Heather Gilligan is a correspondent for the California Health Report at www.healthycal.org.