26 Oct 2016

Día de los Muertos: For the Community, By the Community

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Do you remember a time in your life when you were missing your home? Perhaps you were away at college, relocated temporarily for a job assignment or maybe traveling for longer than a short vacation. Being homesick is a feeling many of us have had at some point in our lives.

Much of the Latino community on the South Coast of San Mateo County in California have established a home here and are also far away from their home land. The Día de los Muertos holiday celebration organized by Puente each year is a great way for our community to feel closer to their loved ones, their extended family and, in turn, to their birth home.

Ten years ago, a mental health professional at Puente brought together a group of three women who were feeling homesick to help support each other. This group of women brainstormed different approaches they could take to feeling less homesick and helping their extended community do the same. The idea of celebrating the Day of the Dead, or Día de los Muertos, was born.

Día de los Muertos is a holiday celebrated mostly in Mexico but also in other Latin American countries during which deceased loved ones are honored. The celebration can last one, two or three days depending the state of Mexico in which you live, and includes the creation of beautiful altars upon which offerings to the dead are made. The altars are decorated with candles, buckets of marigolds, bright red cock’s comb, fruit, plates of mole, loaves of bread, drinks, toys and other symbolic objects that represent the person or people being commemorated.

“We are so thrilled to be celebrating the tenth year of Día de los Muertos at Puente,” said Rita Mancera, executive director. “This program is a great example of what Puente does best—support our community members so that they, in turn, can support their neighbors, friends and family, in this case with a celebratory event.”

The first Día de los Muertos celebration at Puente was an effort to help the mothers of the community fight maternal depression. The women who organized the original event were able to focus on something beyond their immediate situation and offer comfort and support not only for each other but also other people. The celebration is a time for many to feel closer to their home country and loved ones and for others to learn something new about a culture and its tradition.

“This year our Día de los Muertos program ran through the month of October and included weekly workshops for attendees to learn about the history of the holiday and to prepare for the big celebration,” notes Iris Fernandez, Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT). “Puente facilitated the space for workshops and materials for the projects, everything else was organized and led by members of our community.”

This year, three amazing women, Adela Chaves, Marcela Vargas and Leydi Cervantes, organized and ran the Día de los Muertos workshops. Each workshop boasted strong, consistent turnouts and resulted in a beautiful collection of sugar skulls, painted stones and clay figures for the altars and papel picado and paper flowers for the celebration.

Día de los Muertos is an event not to be missed! The community comes together and a feeling of family and warmth fills the air. Join us Thursday, November 3, at Pescadero Grown! farmers’ market. The market runs from 3:00 PM – 7:00 PM, as always, and the Día de los Muertos celebration will begin with the start of the market. This is a special day because it is the final farmers’ market of the season and culminates with the Día de los Muertos celebration.

Special note: the final farmers’ market and the Día celebration have been postponed from the original date of October 27 due to weather reports indicating heavy rain and winds this week.

18 Oct 2016

‘United Dreams’ Come to Life: Puente Opens First-ever South Coast Bilingual Parent Co-op

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October 10 was a big day for eight children in the South Coast community. Puente quietly opened its first-ever parent cooperative preschool for children aged 18-36 months. From now through the end of the school year, four days a week, the kids attending Puente’s pilot program get to play messily and joyfully, sing, shout, read, and learn English and Spanish under the guidance of child development specialists.

The new co-op, known as Sueños Unidos (or United Dreams in English), is housed within Puente’s own childcare center for its first year while Puente seeks funding to move it to a larger dedicated space in 2018. It represents a major leap forward for daycare in Pescadero, which has no consistent, affordable licensed care facility.

“We’re really excited. So many people have put their hearts into this, and finally it feels like this dream is coming true,” says Arlae Alston, Family Engagement Project Manager for Puente.

The pilot program is overseen by two accredited teachers (one full-time, one part-time); a committee of local parents, and Alston herself. Funding for this program comes from the Heising-Simons Foundation, which continues to support the South Coast Family Engagement Initiative, a partnership between Puente and the La Honda-Pescadero Unfied School District, and First 5 of San Mateo County.

Puente has never been afraid to experiment. Its team opened a health care clinic in Puente’s own offices with funding from the San Mateo County Health System because the need was so great and there were no other suitable buildings in town. The parent co-op is a similarly creative solution to a serious need. Children older than 3 years have access to two quality preschools through the La Honda-Pescadero Unified School District. But the working parents of younger children, particularly Spanish-speaking parents, have no choice but to place their younger kids with an informal network of home childcare providers.

Many, if not all of the caregivers are passionate about childcare and child development and until recently they lacked the formal training, resources, and facilities to offer their young charges the enriched formative experience they’ll need to prepare for the social dynamics of preschool. When they get to preschool, the children may also lack the English language skills of their peers– a difference you can see by the age of three.

“Children deserve to play outside, and to be surrounded by physical beauty,” says Alston. “This is a place where kids can explore safely and the adults responsible for them don’t have to worry about the dogs next door and the truck coming in to deliver a load. We will also provide food, so parents don’t have to worry about packing lunch.”

For those unfamiliar with a parent co-op preschool, it is typically a school administered and maintained by parents with a teacher or teachers responsible for educating the preschoolers. At Sueños Unidos, parents are responsible for the childcare routines during the school day while they learn child development from the teachers.

The dream of a free, bilingual parent co-op came together very quickly this summer when Puente partnered with Family Connections, a nonprofit in San Carlos that provides educational services to low-income families. Together with Puente, they applied for and received a grant from First 5 San Mateo County.

Linnea Hoffman leads a committee of local parents who help run the co-op. Alston recruited them all back in June. Hoffman is a stay-at-home mom with two year-old son.

“My son is at an age where I can’t afford daycare and I don’t have family around here I can leave him with. There’s a solution to not having reliable people to watch your children, and I wanted to be a part of that for people here,” she says.

But Hoffman never dreamed that her son would actually be one of the children to benefit from enrolling in the co-op – she thought it would take years. Now she and the other parents on the committee take turns volunteering as teacher’s aides during co-op hours, from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.

At the end of each day, when parents come to pick up their children, the teachers sit down and talk with them for 30 minutes about what happened during the morning. The idea is to learn about best practices: the mothers come away with new skills on everything from language development to how to defuse conflicts.

Most of the parents on the co-op committee are Spanish-speaking. Several are informal local caregivers who want to be part of creating a professional daycare setting. Some are interested in pursuing professional credentials.

Under Alston’s guidance, the committee has set policy for the co-op and interviewed the teachers Puente hired. They also came up with the name Sueños Unidos. Hoffman explains the meaning behind it.

“We all really want the same things for our children and our community’s children. And it’s been fun to think about ways that our kids’ needs can be best met.”

Working and learning together, these parents and their children will form the newest cohort of families who can reach across cultural lines to work for common cause.

“There are two communities here – English-speaking and Spanish-speaking – and they don’t always seem to come together,” says Alston. “We want to provide a space where they have something in common, so they can get to know each other and trust each other.”

And that’s not all. The parents enrolled in the co-op will be required to participate in one ‘Family Night’ per month, instructional workshops for parents to learn about important topics. For example, Puente will bring in an expert to discuss nutrition; a dentist will talk about dental health; and another expert will share tips on positive discipline. The Family Nights are modeled after a highly successful program Puente already offers to parents who want to practice reading with their kids (Raising a Reader) and invest time in their development.

Puente will offer a second monthly workshop for any local parents not in the co-op, which will be a repeat of the first one.

“One of the big goals is to continue to send a message that parents are the first teachers in their children’s lives. We are here to provide tools and remind them of that – they are the ones who hold the power,” says Alston.

In addition to Raising a Reader / Family Nights and the parent co-op, the Heising-Simons Foundation supports Storytime on Wheels, a toy lending library, and Puente’s training sessions for childcare providers. Alston also personally meets with caregivers once a month to continue talking about child development, and she has one-on-one meetings with families to talk about supporting children with special needs.

Hoffman’s son has gone from the world of a stay-at-home kid to a world of learning through play. He and the other kids get to water real pumpkins, finger-paint, play with clay, sand, and even cook. And Hoffman gets to be part of something important, to pioneer a program that has already changed her life and could one day have a big impact on her community.

“Interacting with these other women is amazing, I really look forward to it every day,” she says.

Want to get involved with the parent co-op? Contact Arlae Alston for more information.

11 Oct 2016

Ballet Folklorico: New Program is a Hit among South Coast Kids and Their Parents

“Uno, dos, tres y cuatro. Una vez más!”

If you end up near the Pescadero Elementary School on a Monday evening, as you approach the building you will hear the booming voice of Maestro Zenon Barron as he leads the Ballet Folklorico class, counting and showing his young students the steps. Barron commands the rapt attention of his young pupils, while their parents stand by quietly and watch. Many of the adults remember doing the exact dances in their childhood. They watch with pride. When the parents are asked what they like about the class, one of the moms responds, “I like that he is strict.” The other parents nod.

On September 19, 2016, Puente, ALAS (Ayudando Latinos a Soñar – Helping Latinos Dream) Tonantzin and Pescadero Elementary school launched a Ballet Folklorico class for children ages 6 to 17. Every Monday after school, over 30 children stay and dance Ballet Folklorico at the school. The dancing is not only fun; it gets these young students moving and excited all while listening to music. Most importantly, these students are gaining confidence to perform in front of a crowd.

As Erica Hays, principal of Pescadero Elementary School says, “I’ve been excited to see how many students of all ages are participating in the folklorico classes. There has been a lot of enthusiasm for it. One goal of our after school program is to provide enrichment activities for the children and this is a great opportunity for them.”
Barron has danced professionally for over 30 years. His dance background is impressive and includes experience studying under Amelia Hernandez. He graduated from the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, the premier art academy in Mexico City. Zenon’s creativity and passion for teaching dance is boundless. He also designs the beautiful and elaborate wardrobe for Tonantzin. Creating a wardrobe for the dancers is another aspect of this program. Some of the parents are already excited about making the skirts and finding ways to bring other community members to help in sewing and designing.

Belinda Arriaga, from ALAS in Half Moon Bay, is thrilled to be collaborating to bring Ballet Folklorico to Pescadero. Ballet Folklorico is one of Puente’s newest programs for children and families. “As an organization, we are always finding ways to bring our community together,” says Rita Mancera, Executive Director of Puente. “This is a great example of bridging the students’ experiences with that of their parents. Many of the mothers remember dancing folklorico when they were young, including me.”

The class is open to everyone, which is a key component of the Puente vision to bring communities together. For some students this creates an opportunity to learn about a new culture through dance. For others, to connect with the traditions of their parents. The class starts with simple stretches to warm up. A short sequence of steps is demonstrated by Barron. Once he determines that his students are ready, he starts the music. The students move across the room cheerfully. You can see the smiles on their faces. The music is catchy and as an observer, you can’t help but tap along.

Barron explains, “What I like best about my career as a dance instructor is ultimately working with the children because I consider it the perfect age to develop and nurture their creativity.”
“I believe that through dance, younger students can develop a sensibility for artistry that will make allow them to develop into successful human beings,” remarks Barron.

Puente aims to nurture and grow this program in collaboration with the students’ parents. Similar to the Día de los Muertos workshop this year, leadership will come from the community and will be supported by Puente. Parents will help make the beautiful wardrobe, including colorful skirts, worn during student performances. Another important component is that the parents will be responsible for fundraising—families will solicit donations to keep the program going over the coming years, for the dancers’ wardrobe and for other supplies.

The excitement over these classes is evident. The moms and dads watch with pride as their children dance and learn the choreography. They tap and nod their heads to the music. The best part is that the students look happy and excited—they are truly having fun.

Want to support the Ballet Folklorico program? Click the green box below to donate today.