This article originally appeared in the March-April 1998 Children's Advocate newsmagazine, published by Action Alliance for Children.
By Claudia Miller
Cora Keaton knew the statistics: in 1992, there were 3.2 million grandparents nationwide caring for their grandchildren. In her hometown of Sacramento alone, there were 20,000.
While she'd seen it happening to her friends, she didn't think it would happen to her. But that year, her son asked her to care for his five-month-old twins, as well as his two-year-old and four-year old. "Overnight I went from being a traditional grandparent to taking care of everything," she said.
With neighbors in her Del Paso Heights neighborhood, Keaton helped create the Grandparent Support Group. Meeting weekly, more than 75 grandparents raising grandchildren take parenting classes, learn about legal and guardianship issues, discuss how to find quality child care, exchange nutritional tips for both children and grandparents, and share coping techniques.
The Grandparent Support Group is just one of the many self-help programs created by Del Paso Heights neighborhood residents with the support of the Mutual Assistance Network. MAN is a grass roots, private, nonprofit organization created in 1993 to enlist residents to help revitalize Del Paso Heights, a multi-ethnic community plagued with poverty, a lack of jobs, crime, and drugs.
The grandparent group is typical of MAN's self-help approach, relying on the talents and skills of neighborhood residents to improve neighbors' lives. Its community garden, for example, was the brainchild of a group of Asian residents. "They said to the board, 'if we can grow our own food, we can help ourselves and the neighborhood, too,'" says MAN Board President Lillian Green. Today, members of 85 families grow produce on the four-acre site, a formerly unused plot of land. Now they're thinking about opening a farmer's market to sell their surplus fruits, vegetables, and herbs.
The board that approved the garden proposal is 80 percent neighborhood residents. Of MAN's paid employees, 70 percent live in Del Paso Heights. "You'll find the neighborhood residents everywhere--they're on the personnel committee, so they decide who gets hired. They're on the budget committees, so they decide which programs get funded next year," says MAN Executive Director James Johnson, not himself a neighborhood resident.
Hiring residents to do the work, says Johnson, is crucial to MAN's success. Residents don't just provide "input." As much as possible, they are paid to work for MAN--everyone from youth mentors to grandparent-support-group facilitators.
MAN also relies heavily on public and private foundation support. In addition to the grandparent and garden programs, MAN conducts a parent support group, an Asian community support group, the Block Grandparent Program (a federally funded program that provides intensive in-home family support to more than 100 families), and a support group for youth living away from their parents. MAN also participates in a high-school-dropout-prevention program, neighborhood beautification, an ESL class for Hmong residents, and more.
"Our programs all grew out of needs that the residents of Del Paso Heights had," says Green. "It's important for us to use what we already have here to solve our problems."
Recently, concerns about the effects of welfare reform led MAN to begin focusing on residents' economic needs. The group is now working to acquire land to build a 20,000-square-foot office building that will house commercial businesses as well as several government agencies and MAN. Construction of the building and new businesses in the neighborhood will both create jobs. "What we'd like to do is create a town center," says MAN Economic Development Director Brian Talcott.
MAN's initial focus was on youths and senior citizens, because those groups seemed to have the most needs. "Our young people were getting killed and spending all day hanging out on the street corners," says Green. "The schools were getting bad reputations, and the children were saying they had nothing to do."
For senior citizens, the needs ranged from a simple desire for seats at bus stops to concerns about public safety and transportation.
Shortly after Keaton founded the Grandparent Support Group, another group formed to work with the grandchildren. After all, residents reasoned, if the grandparents were having difficulty making the transition, the children must be, too. The Grandparent Youth Support Group, and a tutoring group that followed, lead weekly discussions with children ages 3 to 17. Jessica Marshall, a grandmother and neighborhood resident, teams with social psychologists to lead the discussions.
"We have more than 50 children involved in these groups," says Marshall. "It's so important for them to talk about what's bothering them and realize that they're not all alone."
A key support to MAN from the beginning has been the Del Paso Heights Neighborhood Service Agency, formed in 1992, when the Sacramento County Department of Human Assistance reorganized nearly all its social services in three neighborhoods, including Del Paso Heights. The idea was to bring services closer to the residents, and to work together on multi-disciplinary teams. The goal, explains Talcott, was to prevent anyone "from falling through the cracks. We wanted to create a seamless neighborhood system of services."
For example, says Talcott, a grandmother raising her grandchildren could join the Grandparent Support Group, get job training or job-search help at the One Stop Career Center (part of the Sacramento Employment and Training Agency), and get help from the service agency in finding child care and seniors' health services.
To support the neighborhood focus, the city of Sacramento created a neighborhood police unit and a neighborhood resource center for children's services. Other federally funded and state and local agencies also brought services to Del Paso Heights.
Rosalind Garner, site coordinator for the Neighborhood Service Agency, works closely with MAN to coordinate neighborhood programs. "As a nonprofit," she says "MAN can do things we can't and as a government agency, we can do things they can't."
That combination, says Johnson, makes MAN different from other organizations where he's worked as a social service professional. "When I came here," Johnson says, "I was used to doing things for people. What we have here is doing things with people. A lot of these people hadn't been given the opportunity to participate at a high level, to be a part of the process for change. The people in the neighborhood have a high energy level and dedication to changing things."
Mutual Assistance Network: (916) 564-0110
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