21 Nov 2015

Puente driving class puts women in the fast lane

Paula Arriola has never been comfortable behind the wheel.

The mother of three has lived in Pescadero for 9 years, but has never driven farther than Morgan Hill. Like thousands of other undocumented Californians, she found herself obliged to drive without a license or any formal driver’s training. You can’t get around the South Coast without a car. But she restricted herself to getting to and from work and taking her daughter to school. “It does make me nervous,” she acknowledges.

It doesn’t help that Arriola, a single mother, has been driving around an old, beat-up car she kept from her former marriage. It doesn’t have an odometer, which is nerve-wracking because she’s always worried that she is speeding.

“I never know how fast I’m driving. I just follow the car in front of me. When there’s a car behind me, I just pull off to the side of the road and let them pass,” she says.

Arriola, whose name has been changed for this story, decided that 2015 would be a year of opportunity. She was emboldened by AB 60, the California law that, as of January 2015, gave all qualified residents the right to apply for a driver’s license regardless of legal status. She wanted a legal license and she wanted her own new, safer car. Her daughter Daisy, a college-bound 18-year-old, was working hard to earn her own driver’s permit and license. (Daisy passed both tests and received her license in September).

But the biggest incentive was hearing that Puente was teaching a class on the rules of the road, specifically to prepare students to pass the DMV “traffic laws and signs” test. And that the class was women-only, and taught by a woman, in Spanish and tuition-free.

Puente launched its AB 60 program in August 2014, with a community workshop to answer questions about the documentation and overall process required to get a legal driver’s license. Locals learned they would need proof of residency and photo identification. The latter could be obtained from the Mexican Consulate in San Francisco, something Puente helped facilitate for dozens of residents.

More than 549,000 undocumented Californians have become licensed drivers since the law went into effect, according to DMV estimates.

In late 2014, Ben Ranz, Puente’s Community Outreach Coordinator, began teaching classes on the rules of the road based on the DMV driver’s manual to help people pass the written test. He passed that role over to Charlea Binford, Puente’s Adult Education Coordinator who also teaches ESL and other Adult Education classes at Puente.

The class is an indispensable tool to help students manage their anxiety about passing the dreaded DMV test by helping them take practice tests, says Binford. There is a tremendous amount of material to memorize, so each class spends two months preparing for it. At the DMV, students can take the written test in Spanish. They can opt to fill out the answers on paper, on a computer screen, or via audio prompts which they answer orally.

Slowly, the numbers are climbing.

“We know of 48 people who have passed their written test. 18 of those 48 are women. 33 of those 48 have gone on to pass the road test,” says Ranz. Overall, Puente has helped 144 people in one way or another through the driver’s license process – whether that’s attendance at an informational session, making an appointment at the DMV, or help getting an ID. Puente even offered one class for farm workers who were never taught to read or write.

The idea for a women’s class came to Rita Mancera and Kerry Lobel, Puente’s leaders, when they noticed the low enrollment of female students in Puente’s co-ed driving classes. A class for women, taught by a woman, held the promise of a safe space where women could speak up without fear and learn at their own pace.

It was also a practical issue. “We knew they were already driving. We saw them bringing their children to school or going to get their groceries. The challenge was to help them a pass the laws and signs test,” says Mancera, Deputy Executive Director of Puente.

In class, students learn driving tips, as well as how to read hard-to-understand road signs, which are full of English words they may not know, and little mnemonic tools to help them memorize things like which way to turn the driving wheel when parking on a hill.

Even though she’s been driving for years, Arriola learned valuable information in class – like the importance of strapping her 7-year-old daughter into her child’s seat every single time they go for a drive, no matter how close their destination may be.

Many lessons are learned in the course of group conversations that build everyone’s confidence, because students teach each other the rules that they already know.

“I think men’s energy can change the dynamic of a group. This was the first time I’ve taught an all-women group, and I think it’s great. When one woman feels discouraged, the other women will raise her spirits,” says Binford.

Binford just finished teaching Puente’s second driving theory class for local women. Both classes have delivered a good success rate, with nearly all students going on to ace the written exam – if not at first, then eventually. The female students are exceptionally perseverant. One woman failed the test nine times before she passed it. For many participants, it was the first class they had taken in 15 or 20 years.

“I tell them they will probably fail the first time because they’re so stinking nervous. But they can take it again. And they’ll be able to think clearer the second time through once they get a feel for how the test is,” says Binford.

Arriola wasted no time taking her written exam at the DMV on November 16, which she passed with panache. She credits her Puente prep class. “I believe it’s better with all women. You feel comfortable with other women. We have more confidence together,” she says.

Paula Arriola with her new license.

Paula Arriola with her new license.

For Binford, teaching is personal. She not only helps schedule her students’ DMV tests, she takes time out to drive them to the DMV, either in Redwood City, Capitola or Watsonville. She helps them manage their anxiety and oversees the registration process. When her students pass the test, she takes them out for ice cream to celebrate.

Sometimes Puente works with volunteers who also drive people to the DMV. It’s so important to have that human touch, says Binford. “Students are so nervous, and the DMV is not a welcoming place.”

Sometimes a DMV employee will challenge a woman’s proof of residency. Household bills and other acceptable forms of proof of residency are often in a husband’s name. In cases like that, Puente writes a letter on the woman’s behalf that affirms that she is a member of the community. This is an accepted document at the DMV, but Binford often has to intercede and make sure the DMV employees cooperate with the letter of the law.

When a student passes her driver’s test, it feels like both she and Binford have won.

“It’s such a privilege, because this process makes us friends. It’s something that we go through together and it makes me really happy to see their success,” she says.

Now, Binford is taking her students to the next level with a driving tutorial. She recently set up traffic cones in the parking lot of Pescadero High School and invited the women to practice steering and parallel parking. Binford is not a driving instructor, so she did not drive with them, but offered pointers through the car window. She also demonstrated how to change a tire. “They can practice with me and no one’s going to laugh at them or raise their voice,” she says.

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Arriola would like to pass her driving test by the end of 2015. Having a driver’s license is not just a practical matter, but also a key to a brighter future. She works two cleaning jobs to support her family and pays the bills on her own. She also takes ESL and Zumba classes at Puente, which she balances with her other obligations.

“My goal is to have a different job. Or to be in charge of the cleaning service, to own my own business,” she says.

Arriola wants to drive her 7-year-old daughter up to Oregon to visit their relatives. She can already picture herself behind the wheel of her new car. “I’m growing with all these new things. I’m happy,” she adds.

Support women’s empowerment by donating to purchase emergency driver kits by clicking here.

14 Nov 2015

Puente prepares for “Godzilla” El Niño storm season

Out on the South Coast, weather predictions of a “Godzilla” El Niño storm season are more than a little unsettling. Long-timers remember the last El Niño winter in 1998, and the disasters it wrought on the communities of Pescadero, La Honda and surrounding areas.


Residents still tell the stories from that year: the flooding that poured 17 inches of water into homes on Stage Road, in downtown Pescadero. How it knocked out a bridge in Butano Canyon, and how it turned Pescadero High School – the community’s only emergency shelter – into a water-bound island that was all but inaccessible. Emergency vehicles found the main road into Pescadero impassable. A major landslide on Highway 84, the mountain road that links Pescadero and La Honda, shut all traffic down for weeks while the county made repairs.

Flooding in Pescadero.
Flooding in Pescadero.
 
In other words, locals were on their own. And they know that hasn’t changed.


“In a major natural disaster, like an earthquake or a big storm that affects the entire Peninsula, we are going to be last people that anyone is worried about,” says Ben Ranz, Community Outreach Coordinator for Puente.


“Help could come, but we’re going to be last on the list. And if a tree falls down and blocks the road – they wouldn’t be able to get us supplies, even if they wanted to,” he adds.


The farther away they live from a city center, the more acutely Coastsiders are already aware of the need to be prepared for a serious emergency, according to emergency personnel. This translates into having at least three days’ worth of food supplies, the minimum they’ll need to shelter in place.

 

But Puente knows many locals will need much more help than that. So Puente is working with the county to anticipate the gaps in First Aid, shelter and communication that will ensue in a major El Niño event.

 

“We know that we will be the responders. People are going to come to us, call us to find out information and ask what they should be doing with their families,” says Rita Mancera, Deputy Executive Director of Puente.

 

The good news is that Puente, and the South Coast, are getting help from the best possible source: the San Mateo County Office of Emergency Services, or OES. Historically, the OES has focused on the most populous parts of the county, with occasional side-trips to offer workshops and trainings on the coast. The result was that some Coastsiders had the training and knowledge to handle a natural catastrophe, but they were poorly networked and loosely organized.

 

That changed in late 2013, when Nick Gottuso became the first-ever Coastside District Coordinator for San Mateo County OES. His is a full-time job overseeing rural stretches from Montara all the way down to the Santa Cruz County line, including Half Moon Bay. Gottuso has been extremely busy these past 18 months, teaming with Coastside/Cal Fire Battalion Chiefs Ari Delay and Dave Cosgrave, giving two-hour Emergency Prep presentations where he answers questions about the county’s ability to respond in an emergency and what residents can do to help themselves until real help arrives.

 

Gottuso and his Battalion Chief partners also offer CERT classes (Community Emergency Response Teams), which covers a lot more ground than CPR and basic First Aid. In a CERT class, for instance, adults learn search and rescue techniques like how to use cribbing to lift broken pieces of concrete off someone who may be trapped underneath.

 

Gottuso says the Coastside CERT classes have seen record attendance from locals who are eager for lifesaving tips. That’s a very good sign.

 

“The more people can take care of themselves, the more resources they can free up for someone who needs our help more than they do,” he says.

 

Gottuso, a former police captain, has created the Coastside Emergency Corps (CEC). The Corps encompasses 118 volunteers who have the best emergency response training, including those with professional medical skills, CERT trainees, ham radio operators, Red Cross shelter personnel, Large Animal Evacuation Group members, and people qualified to work in an OES central command setting. In an innovative program unknown elsewhere, Coastside Emergency Corps volunteers are covered as County employees for workers compensation if they are injured during training or a real activation.

 

Gottuso also decided to issue special holographic identification cards to Corps members, who have all been fingerprinted and have passed background checks. The cards list their skills and qualifications. They can show the cards to OES officials in an emergency and receive clearance.

 

Gottuso’s presence has made a big difference already, according to Ranz. Puente is now a part of the South Coast Emergency Group, a smaller subset that meets once a month to discuss emergency readiness in Pescadero and surrounding communities.

 

“Before Nick came, we were reliant on community people thinking and talking about disaster preparedness, but a lot of them moved away,” says Ranz. “This was a great step toward recognizing that we have special needs.”

 

Those needs were laid bare in the wake of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that killed tens of thousands in Japan in March 2011. California officials issued, and then cancelled, a tsunami evacuation notice for the Coastside when no tsunami materialized. But hundreds of locals evacuated anyway due to misinformation and the terrifying images broadcast on TV. The result: gridlock on Highway 92, which prevented the county from getting through with food supplies for Pescadero’s Red Cross emergency shelter. Puente bought food and Puente youth, many trained as CERT volunteers, stepped in because the Red Cross didn’t have bilingual staff members to translate. CERT-trained volunteers were not formally activated, and Puente staff had trouble reaching many residents by telephone.

 

Community Outreach Coordinator Ben Ranz, center, with members of the South Coast community.
Community Outreach Coordinator Ben Ranz, center,
with members of the South Coast community.

 

In brief, “it was panic,” says Mancera. “What we got out of the situation was that we were not ready.”

 

Puente is far more ready today than four years ago. After the tsunami scare, Puente obtained a grant from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to train community members in CPR and First Aid. Every Puente youth and nearly every Puente adult staff member receives CPR and First Aid training and residents at nearby ranches, farms and businesses have also been trained. Three Puente employees are CERT trained and are also ham radio operators. Three of them are CEC members. Local school district staff has received similar training.

 

Disasters aren’t always forged by Mother Nature. Puente has a lot of practice reacting to local crises, like when a mushroom farm shut down, costing 300 jobs. Puente helped with rent payments for the newly unemployed. Or when a fire displaced nearly 30 farm workers and their families: Puente helped them find shelter.

 

As fall turns to winter, Puente is starting to work on a community phone tree that, once activated, will help get important information to farms and ranches far out of cell phone range. And the Silicon Valley Community Foundation has generously committed to reimburse Puente for up to $50,000 of disaster spending on behalf of the community. Puente’s longstanding partnership with the La Honda-Pescadero Unified School District increases community capacity to reach the region’s adults and children.

 

It doesn’t take a tsunami or a 100-year storm to bring Pescadero to cut off the community from the rest of the world. A rainfall on November 1 left big puddles of standing water by the roadside, a prelude of worse yet to come. Creek flooding is a long-term struggle in the community, much of which also lies below sea level. And when it floods, the water can take days to recede.

 

“People need to understand that we’re all really vulnerable here,” says Kerry Lobel, Puente’s Executive Director. “Thanks to a partnership with the Red Cross, Puente has emergency bags that items can augment with their own supplies. We really encourage people to have food and water and other disaster items ready, because there’s already only a limited number of items you can buy in town.”



For more information about disaster preparedness, contact Ben Ranz at Puente at branz@mypuente.org

08 Nov 2015

Making a Difference in This Season of Giving

One of the best parts of working at Puente for Abby Mohaupt, Volunteer Coordinator and Faith Community Liaison, is making the list of what South Coast community members will receive at the end of the year.

Between ESL graduation, the last Zumba class of December, Posada, La Sala Christmas, Homework Club celebration, the annual Hannukah party at the Pescadero Elementary School, and gift card distribution for families, Puente collects and gives away over 4000 items to close to 500 individuals and families. Pencils, backpacks, sleeping bags, socks, crayons, hoodies, towels, dreidels, puppets, and more—all get sorted into stockings and bags and boxes.

“It can be a little overwhelming to make that list and then think about collecting everything, but it’s also amazing to know that each item will be donated,” says Mohaupt. “We’ll make 125 stockings for children to get from Santa at Posada—and those stockings are filled with toys and books, as well as handmade scarves and school supplies.” In the past, the stockings have been packed by volunteers. This year students from San Mateo’s Serra High School will do the packing.

Volunteers from 2012 with donations for La Sala.

Abby Mohaupt, left, with volunteers from 2012 with donations for La Sala.

For Kerry Lobel, Executive Director, the stockings have a personal meaning. “One year, my mom said, ‘why not give every child a Christmas stocking?’ so we do!” she says. The stockings are given to children by Santa at Posada.

It’s not just children who receive things during the holiday season. For many years, Puente gave away bags of much-needed items to farmworkers. This year will mark the second year that participants in La Sala will have the opportunity to fill their own bags and boxes with what they’ll need for the year.

“In the past, we’ve had volunteers pack bags of toiletries, sweatshirts, tshirts and other things that we think farmworkers need. Last year we set up the multipurpose room in the elementary school so that each participant could pick what they wanted instead of what we think they needed,” Mohaupt remarks. Those volunteers have been invaluable to Puente and to the end of the year collection and distribution.

Rethinking La Sala’s Christmas experience let the men choose exactly what they wanted and needed—so some of the men took 5 deodorants and some took 1, some took 3 sweatshirts and some took 5 tshirts instead. Sleeping bags donated by Harvey Milk Academy in San Francisco were a big hit.

“It was a joyful sight to see workers fill up their own Christmas bags,” Ben Ranz, Puente’s Community Outreach Coordinator recalls. “That room was full of smiles!  It was also educational for us – we learned that towels are a much hotter commodity than we realized, so we will be getting many more of those this year.”

Toiletries laid out for La Sala Christmas in 2014.

Toiletries laid out for La Sala Christmas in 2014.

This year also marks the second year that donations collection have been done through the online giving site, Roonga. The site lets donors buy specific items for Puente’s collection and at the end of the drive, all the donations arrive at Puente at the same time. This has cut down on donations taking up much-needed storage space and allows Mohaupt to easily track what Puente has and what still needs to be donated.

Even so, many committed and generous donors still want the experience of collecting real items. Members of Peninsula Metropolitan Community Church, just one of many faith communities who help with the end of the year drive, are collecting glue sticks, soap, shampoo, and hot wheels. Rev. Terri Echelbarger says that for her congregation, “the tangible part of ritually collecting supplies as a part of our worship directly connects our folks to Puente in an important way.” Members of the congregation will also volunteer at Puente’s December 18th Posada celebration.

Other donors prefer to put even more agency into the hands of participants. Since 2011 Puente has been giving gift cards to participants so that families could purchase the presents and food they wanted for the holidays. “Parents know exactly what their kids want and need, so we empower them to choose the way they celebrate,” says Lobel, “and buy what they want.”

Laura Rodriguez, Community Resource Navigator at Puente, is the person who calls families and registers them for gift cards. She says that “we want families to have a happy Christmas and by giving parents the tangible hope that they can provide for their families with these cards” we get to support the celebration.

One of the families who received gift cards in 2014.

One of the families who received gift cards in 2014.

One mother, who asked to remain anonymous, said, “With the gift cards that I receive for my children I purchase clothing for them since many times we do not have enough money. Thanks to Puente I am happy that I am able to give my children presents and make their Christmas special. The gift card that I receive for food, I buy food that is needed in my home.”

This year, Puente needs to raise $13,000 for those gifts cards to Mi Pueblo, Target, and Ross—which will be given to participants who sign up for them in increments of $50. Some of those cards will be donated by First Congregational Church of Palo Alto.

The rest of the $13,000 will be raised through Razoo on Giving Tuesday (December 1) and Puente staff are gearing up for a big day of fundraising. Donations can be scheduled ahead of time online or by contacting Patrick Letellier, Puente’s Development Director at pletellier@mypuente.org or by calling 650-262-4090.