The history and idea of California are so tied up with oil—from the oil fields of Bakersfield and Signal Hill to millionaires like J. Paul Getty and Armand Hammer to the state’s famous car-and-freeway culture—that it is hard to imagine the state without oil. But that is exactly what many Californians are imagining.

For decades, any discussion of limiting oil was quickly overwhelmed by fears about job losses or high gas prices, and as suburbs and cars expanded, oil consumption rose. Today, with the drought making the idea of global warming more real, there’s a different kind of discussion.

Technologies as diverse as Facebook, compost bins, and electric vehicles have made many Californians see themselves as participants in building an oil-free future, without much fear of the potential downsides. And the participants are hardly ideologues. When I found Hubina early one morning in June, he’d just come back from surfing. He recoiled when I asked if he considered himself an environmentalist. “No! I love nature. Everyone loves dolphins.”

To better understand this change, I recently drove north along the coast to Santa Barbara. It was in this wealthy jewel-box community that the modern environmental movement was born in 1969, with a 4-million-gallon oil spill. Photographs of thousands of pitiful oil-soaked birds sparked the creation of Earth Day and the EPA, among other environmental institutions.

“The oil hit the shores and it energized us,” said Paul Relis, who was one of the original members of Get Oil Out, or GOO, a grassroots activist group that expanded its mission from cleaning up the oil spill to a radical opposition to oil use itself. Relis, like many transformed by the spill, went on to a lifetime of environmentalism, working at California’s own environmental protection agency and then as entrepreneur with a company that converts waste from 40 Southern California cities into renewable natural gas. “We developed a blueprint for getting off oil,” he says of his fellow activists. “But, unlike 45 years ago, now we have the technology to do it. California is kicking ass.”

In June of 1969, Marc McGinnes was a young lawyer with a new baby when Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey encouraged him to move to Santa Barbara to start the new field of environmental law. McGinnis taught environmental law for 33 years at UC Santa Barbara. Looking back, he has regrets. The environmental movement deflected energy from the civil rights struggle, he says. What’s more, the movement morphed from a citizen’s initiative that was concerned with community into a consumerist one. Consumers saw environmentalism as self-interest, used purchasing and boycotts to vote with their pocketbooks, and when it came to oil they were torn between their cars and their environmental aspirations.

For decades, Californians voted like conflicted consumers, too: When oil prices were low, they voted against oil drilling offshore. But when oil prices were high, they’d reverse their opinion on the sanctity of national parks and pristine beaches to vote in favor of drilling, according to work done by UC Santa Barbara professor Eric R.A.N. Smith.

After the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, national environmental groups focused their energy on reducing oil drilling in the U.S. while oil consumption and imports grew. But Santa Barbara’s independent environmental groups remained committed to “Getting Oil Out”—entirely, not just reducing oil drilling.

Santa Barbara became a demonstration project, with wealthy locals offering both money and volunteer time to back a citizen’s campaign against oil that didn’t have support elsewhere. They supported the Environmental Defense Center, a public interest law firm that has worked on behalf of cleaner oceans, air, and endangered species while taking on dozens of cases against oil exploration, extraction, and processing, not to mention a golf course owned by the oil company ARCO, since 1977. Starting in 1971, the Community Environmental Council worked to solve local problems in sustainable ways. When local landfills filled, they pioneered city recycling, and then exported their model statewide; in 2004, they decided to try to move the region off of fossil fuels within this generation, focusing on reducing oil demand, rooftop solar and electric vehicles.

The rest of California is now starting to think a lot like the utopians of Santa Barbara. Recently, the state legislature prepared Senate Bill 350 to reduce the state’s oil consumption by half by 2030. In a July poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, the bill was supported by 73 percent of Californians. Rather than being afraid, a surprising number saw an economic upside in getting oil out: In polls, 43 percent of Californians said that cutting gasoline use would create jobs, while only 13 percent said it would kill them.

SB 350’s radical prescription on oil use was defeated politically, without a vote, in part by the Western States Petroleum Association, which had funded 14 “grassroots” groups with goofy names like “Fed Up At the Pump,” and “Tank the Tax.” (Moderate Democrats, who must depend heavily on corporations for campaign contributions in California’s new election primary system, blocked the oil provision.) But outside of Sacramento, Californians just aren’t that into oil anymore: Between 2008 and 2014, the country’s highest gas prices led drivers to decrease their gas consumption by a billion gallons a year

No place in California has been more beholden to oil and more bedeviled by it than the East Bay city of Richmond. There, the grid of modest houses ends at the train tracks and the refinery picks up with streets named Xylene and Petrolite. Richmond is about as far from a jewel-box of billionaires as you can get: The Chevron refinery is so much a part of the town’s identity that Richmond High’s mascot is an oil can. Still, Richmond has become a leader in the push to eject oil from California. After a disastrous refinery fire in August 2012 that sent 15,000 people to the hospital, the city elected only anti-Chevron candidates in 2014 even though the company spent $72 per voter.

I caught up with Andrés Soto, musician and organizer for Communities for a Better Environment, in the organization’s big downtown space decorated with pictures of radical abolitionist John Brown, labor activist Joe Hill, and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Soto’s story is as much about 30 years of successful neighborhood organizing as it is about Chevron—and how the fire, the company’s failure to support the local hospital, and demands for tax breaks have eroded its social license to operate. Eventually, Richmond voters saw no upside in accommodating the company. Soto is convinced that Chevron is not part of the city’s long-term future. As oil demand falls, Chevron will hang on while smaller refineries close, but eventually it will close too. Anyway, rising sea levels will begin to encroach on the refinery’s cooling towers, which were built on reclaimed land. Soto wants the city to make plans to use the refinery’s site for cleaner energy production: solar, wind, or tidal.

At AdamsCrest Farm in the Richmond hills, the local non-profit Urban Tilth is tending gardens at an unused school where they grow more than 5,000 pounds of produce a year. The refinery is the biggest thing on the horizon, but it’s not part of the future imagined by Jessie Alberto, who coordinates volunteer farmers and interns. Alberto is studying geology not to work for oil companies—which have employed generations of geologists—but with the aim of being an urban planner. There are more jobs—and more hope—in the crazy eruptions of squash vines and piles of compost behind him than in the refinery. But he recognizes that Chevron has kept property values low in Richmond, making it one of the few affordable areas in the Bay Area. He’s wary of making the farm too neat or artsy enough to attract gentrifiers. “It’s good to have some chaos,” he says.

When Gov. Brown took SB350 out of the running, he said that Big Oil had won a skirmish, but would lose the war. The losing of that war will take some time: The state uses 629 million barrels of oil yearly, is the third largest producer and third largest refiner in the U.S.

But one reason the war will be lost is that Californians are no longer acting like conflicted consumers. They have now purchased more than 123,000 electric and plug-in electric vehicles. As of fall 2014, 10 percent of new vehicle sales in the state were either electric, plug-in hybrids, or hybrids like Priuses. This is not enough to change the state’s energy balance, but seems to be enough to change the psychology.

From Richmond, I drove over to Albany where some old friends wanted to show me the new blue Nissan Leaf that they’ve named “The Toad.” Their daughter, 15, sees signs of climate change everywhere from the neighborhood’s dead lawns to the snowless Sierras. She championed the little electric Leaf when one of the family’s two cars needed replacing. Leasing a Leaf—with state and federal incentives—fit the family budget, and the parents liked the idea of skipping the cost and hassle of buying gas.

They even installed solar panels that feed the Leaf, making them participants in generously funded state programs—and in a very different future. As we whizzed noiselessly over the brown East Bay hills past the Phillips 66 refinery in Rodeo, my friends and their kids talked about battery range as avidly as they had talked about Fruit Ninjas video games a few years ago. Not being gasoline consumers has become part of their identity. They aren’t afraid. And it is very easy to imagine the refinery gone.

The post Imagining California Without Oil Refineries appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

According to the Alameda County Public Health Department, over 500 Native American babies are born in our county each year. With our colleagues at the Strong Families Tribal Home Visiting Project, we have worked with more than 50 of these children in the past two years, meeting with them weekly or biweekly from pregnancy through age three. We support families by connecting them to the services they need, while also providing tools for nourishing community and family health, teaching life skills, and developing parenting knowledge and engagement. We are part of the extended family for urban Native Americans in this county.

Oakland today reflects an important part of Native American history. In 1953, Congress passed HRC 108, which aimed to shut down rural reservations and relocated more than 100,000 Native people to designated cities. Due to this relocation, 70 percent of us now live in cities, including those in the Bay Area. Moving from as far away as Oklahoma, families got very little support for the actual re-making of their lives when they were placed in government housing in the Bay Area. They were deliberately separated from each other in an attempt to hasten their integration.

Uprooted families struggled with lack of support, invisibility, discrimination, and separation from their communities and culture. But in the early 1960s, a new, politically conscious “Urban Rez” began to take shape as Native American leaders created community in Oakland and San Francisco. These leaders founded the Native American Health Center, where we work, as well other resource centers and friendship associations that provided everything from Wednesday night community dinners—where people could form new bonds—to health care. Years later, our community still needs special care: Community members face all the issues of living in East Oakland while support networks are stretched to the breaking point between multiple cities and rural areas.

Our program aims to meet the whole family where they are at: Some need information, some need services, and others need more. If they need food or housing, we help with that. If they need help advocating for themselves for housing, in court, at school, or with health care, we take them and help them learn the system. We’ve come to understand that it doesn’t make sense to teach a lesson on potty training if the water or lights are shut off. We help with what they need first.

Sometimes things go really well. A home visit that Paty did recently went like this: The family’s 11-month-old baby was walking for the first time. She was doing that funny stumble they do; it was amazing. The family has stable housing and food right now. Their six-year-old daughter was home from school. And so was the dad. And Paty got to see all of them interacting with one another. The daughter said, “I want to exercise and you should, too, Dad,” which showed Paty that the whole family is engaged in thinking about their health. So she did a lesson on hand-eye coordination and also on setting boundaries. To Paty, that was a successful visit: Everybody in the family was participating. No one was stressed, upset, or uncomfortable.

This is a textbook case of what our visits are supposed to be like. Our “textbook” is a curriculum called Family Spirit, which teaches health education, life skills, child development, and parenting skills through home visits, which was developed by rural Apache and Navajo tribes in partnership with Johns Hopkins University. But we’ve found we’ve had to stray from the textbook, too. Our families come from 200 different tribes—not just two—and in Oakland, our families struggle to navigate the overburdened, often dysfunctional service system. For urban Native Americans, we’ve had to take the broader view that community is extended family.

We’ve also had to go well beyond routine home visits. For example, Cara had only known a mom for a few months when the mother went into labor. Normally, the new mom would have support from family members. But this mother was on her own, so Cara kept her company the morning she had to go in to be prepped for her C-section, drove her to the hospital, and waited with her until it was time for the procedure. This broke down a wall between them. When someone’s vulnerable and has no one to walk with them in heavy situations, our job is to be there for them. We see it as a way to build trust with them and their child. This mother was able to open up to Cara about what she needed.

It’s the aunty thing: Traditionally, you’d have grandparents, aunties, uncles and extended family members to help raise a child, help give you guidance. Some of these families have only us to support them and so we become like aunties. We’re moms ourselves and we want to empower them as parents. Paty worked with a mother who was short-tempered with her children. She had been in the foster system with very little contact with her own parents, so she had never had an example of attentive parenting to follow. When Paty goes to the house, she gives the child five to ten minutes of conversation time to get things off his chest. Now she’s noticed that his mother has started doing that, too. She lets her son have his chatterbox moments and she invites him to help her with activities.

Part of the reason our program works is that we’re community members—not social workers. The term social worker reminds people of the times when Native children were taken from their homes by government workers and placed in Mission schools. Native parents feel that social workers judge us, or they’re looking to see if the house is clean, and they might take our kids. It is a fear we peer specialists understand, as Native children in California and all over the country are still routinely placed with non-native foster parents.

When we work with families in Oakland, we’re pushing them to change in small ways, but we’ve also had to push ourselves to re-imagine how we work with people. Here’s an example: A mainstream social services agency might just give a handout on budgeting to a family and leave it at that. Cara took one family to shop for groceries while at the same time providing savings strategies and empowering the mother to look at healthy options while in the grocery store. Even the children were engaged in exploring healthy foods—touching, smelling, and tasting fresh fruit and vegetables. For an isolated, single mother with two young children in a big city, it can make a big difference to have a supportive person with you at the grocery store.

There is no substitute for family, but our team is doing its best to re-create a traditional community with a nine-to-five work week. Some of the parents we work with have never known a healthy, consistent relationship. We meet when we say we will meet; we let them know if we are running late; we show up every week when they ask; we listen to them without judgment; we believe in them when they have trouble believing in themselves. The work is slow, but it is powerful.

When parents feel held with tenderness and accountability, they are better able to hold and nourish their child, and we believe the result will be a stronger community.

The post Nourishing Native American Community Five Days a Week appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The average family income in the area is $23,000 a year. The first day I started teaching there, a cold, winter morning, I saw prostitutes out walking. Old couches and mattresses littered the street behind campus. During my first month at Burton Tech, a woman was found burned and dead in a grocery cart a few blocks over.

What I want to tell you is how three of my students—Yamilex Velgara, Daniel Moreno, and Heidy Santos—ended up going to UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Brown University this fall. In seeing how they accomplished the American dream of starting with very little and still going to a prestigious university, you can see one particular formula for success.

I taught Yamilex, Daniel, and Heidy during their junior year of high school and got to know them well—one of the benefits of teaching writing. Yamilex is the no-nonsense one. Alpha female. Class president. Valedictorian. Fast food job on the side. When she finished work early in class, she didn’t socialize or sleep. Instead, she pulled out a book or other classwork and worked on it diligently. What wasn’t obvious was that her dad’s first wife was in a gang and three of her four brothers are on probation. She told me she needed to make something of her life.

Daniel and I connected early in the year when we discovered we both admired trees. Daniel is the kind of kid who’d ride his bike over 50 miles in one day, conducting his own impromptu tour of Los Angeles colleges. But after his father left them, his family of five lost their home during the recession and they were homeless for a time. For Daniel, the lessons from this were clear: education was the only way out. Not being able to hear people talk because police sirens were blaring was an important reminder to do his homework.

Heidy was detail-oriented and inquisitive. She frequently stayed after class to ask questions until she completely understood an assignment. She volunteered hundreds of hours to host school and community events like blood drives and fundraisers. Her parents had both immigrated from El Salvador with grammar school educations. In her college application essay, she wrote about living in a one-bedroom apartment with six people. She studied by the light of an old laptop, her mattress so close to her parents’ she could touch them.

As a charter school, of course we knew we were working with a curated population of kids—students with parents saavy enough to find alternatives to the local schools. Furthermore, they’d also been selected by teachers and mentors along the way. But what distinguished the class with my three students from previous classes was not just their camaraderie but also a collective momentum, an innate recognition early on of their own intellectual talent and driving ambition. Even though only 7 percent of the community has more than a high school education, 66 percent of their freshman class ended up going to a four-year college.

Once they got to Burton Tech, we showered them with advantages they wouldn’t have had in traditional public schools. We had a brand new, secure campus, digital “smartboards” in every classroom, and a 10th grade class dedicated to the basic skills needed to pass the California High School Exit Exam. All critical tests such as the SAT—as well as college tours to New York and elsewhere—were covered free of charge. Additionally, all students were on a college track curriculum because it was the only curriculum offered. And when it came time to write those college essays, they were enrolled in a class (taught by me) that made sure they wrote a compelling one.

We brought in guest speakers by the ton. We provided them with a rare high school afterschool program called “All-Stars” where they gained valuable leadership and management experience by hosting community events. So they no longer just heard about college and careers second-hand, they saw them, breathed them, and lived them for themselves.

But resources alone don’t make for success.

Our charter school had its challenges—we had high teacher turnover, the regular hiring of un-credentialed Teach for America teachers and rookie teachers just out of school, and unproven and experimental teaching practices forced upon us. And don’t get me started on the excessive number of donor visits where the gaze of big-moneyed education reformers was uncomfortably distracting at best—and zoological at worst.

But at Burton Tech, the teachers and students did share a crucial commonality that is often missing when working with minority students. Many of us were teachers of color from immigrant backgrounds. Most of us were first-generation college students just a decade ago. One Mexican-American teacher went from working construction to community college to graduating summa cum laude from UCLA and then USC with his masters. The very popular Iranian-American calculus teacher also went from a junior college to a UC (Irvine). A social science teacher from Ghana grew up in South Los Angeles himself and then went on to UC Santa Barbara.

I often told them my own story, and though my family was from Vietnam and my students were from Mexico and Central America, I wanted them to see the similarities between us. Refugees and immigrants. Monolingual parents who didn’t go to school in this country. The urban violence of North Long Beach and South L.A, which was a mere 10 miles apart. The sense of isolation and confusion applying for college that only magnified once I got there.

We didn’t just relate to the students. We actually looked like them. We had lived like them. A few years earlier, we were them in all the ways that mattered. To them, we were role models who had succeeded “out there.” For us, they weren’t brown kids that needed to be “saved” in the Hollywood Dangerous Minds model. They were talented youth that just needed a road map to guide their already evident gifts.

We took on a parental role, comforting them when they needed comfort, but also pushing them when they needed to be pushed. There was a lot of tough, even harsh love. We shoved them when it came to every college-going factor: grades, AP tests, SAT, extracurriculars, and college essays. We asked them to do things that made them uncomfortable and go beyond their own imagined limits. Many of us had been short-changed by teachers who had expected so little of us, we weren’t going to let that happen again.

Studies show that the surest predictor of college attendance is not the school students attend nor the qualifications and experience of its teachers, but whether your parents graduated from college. If your home does not have parents who went to college, you need a surrogate for college role-modeling. We tried to do that for them: “You used to tell us your stories about college and I was like, ‘Man, I want to do that,’” said Daniel.

A few weeks before my “kids” left for college, I took them out for a farewell lunch. We went to an Italian restaurant just a few miles from their neighborhood. They had never been there, had never eaten gnocchi or gelato. It reminded me of the time my high school mentor, a newspaper reporter, took me to eat calamari for the first time.

I was so excited for them and all the new experiences they were about to have. They would be so many firsts that their new lives would burst with them. Yamilex said she wanted to become a family doctor with a determination that suggested the only thing barring her way is time itself. Daniel is not sure what he wants to do yet, but he’s finding his way with neighborhood activism. Heidy said she planned to work for the U.N. or UNICEF. She said it so casually it took me aback: She had already become a confident, big-picture Ivy Leaguer without even stepping on campus.

Two days ago, I was reminded about how I am still teaching them. Yamilex sent me a text asking how do citations on a paper. Today, Heidy sent me a picture of her first college paper and the first A she had earned at Brown.

How do you measure that?

The post When Teachers Look and Have Lived Like Their Students appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I hung up the phone, I felt demoralized reflecting on the fact that I and so many of my public health colleagues across California have been working to reduce the burden of asthma for decades. If we’re still seeing discouraging data, does that mean California is losing the fight against asthma?

The answer is that we’re not losing, but it’s also not a fight we’ll be “done with” any time soon. We’re not working on a communicable disease for which we might discover a vaccine. Asthma is a complex chronic disease, and its prevalence and severity are shaped by an array of factors from access to medical care to climate change to transportation policy to income inequality. This requires a comprehensive, long-term response. Some health conditions have a single cause, like a virus; asthma is not one of them.

When a kid ends up in the ER in Madera with asthma, the list of potential culprits is long. Sure, the cause could be the region’s chronically poor air quality, but the cause of this particular child’s asthma attack on this particular day could also be housing infested by cockroaches or containing mold, which are common asthma triggers. Another child’s family might need to use certain medications more consistently, requiring instructions on how to manage his or her asthma from a community health worker who speaks Hmong. We now have evidence suggesting stressful experiences, like living with someone who is abusive, could lead children to develop asthma, so that child needs a social worker. Finally, while every asthma attack is its own perfect storm, asthma hits low income communities and communities of color particularly hard: This is most striking for blacks, who have 40 percent higher asthma prevalence, four times higher asthma ER visits and hospitalization rates, and two times higher asthma death rates than whites in California.

We started off thinking asthma was a medical issue, but it quickly revealed itself to be a social—and even a moral—one. Here’s a bit of history: When my organization, Regional Asthma Management & Prevention, started about 20 years ago, we worked to do a better job of medically managing asthma by communicating with healthcare providers, school personnel, parents, and children with asthma. It was apparent, though, that clinical management could not be successful if children were continuously exposed to asthma triggers in their homes, schools, and neighborhoods. So we started working with community health workers to identify and remove triggers in the home, and that lead us to eventually trying to get landlords to improve their rental properties. Similarly, efforts to reduce triggers in schools expanded out of the schools themselves and into the community, as well as to policymakers, like a statewide association of school board members and the state legislature. Recognizing that neighborhoods with high asthma hospitalization rates tended to have a concentration of refineries, ports, railways, and freeways with heavy truck traffic led us to collaborate with community activists, environmental justice advocates, and public health colleagues on the Ditching Dirty Diesel Collaborative to pressure regional and state air quality agencies to better monitor and regulate diesel pollution. Any thread we grabbed turned into something much larger and more complex.

Diesel is a good example. The presence of such high concentrations of diesel sources led us to more fundamental questions about why major transport corridors went through neighborhoods typically made up of people of color who were disproportionately poor. So our work expanded to better understand how land-use and transportation decisions are made. In effect, what began as an initiative focused on a single disease with an emphasis on clinical care has expanded to include policy advocacy for improved outdoor air quality, participation in land-use and transportation planning, and promoting health equity.

As our understanding of the magnitude of the asthma challenge has grown, progress has been made. California has done ground-breaking research, such as one of the largest studies linking air pollution to asthma and another study identifying racial and ethnic disparities in the quality of asthma care, helping us understand how to best manage, treat, and—importantly—prevent asthma. To keep kids out of the ER, school-based health centers, community clinics, and mobile clinics help high-risk children before they’re in a crisis. And community health workers have developed culturally competent ways to talk with families about the risks of tobacco smoke—and helped them strategize how to keep it out of the house without making family members feel bad.

We’re making progress with better healthcare policies, too. Recently a federal agency, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, passed a policy that state Medicaid agencies can provide reimbursement for essential services, like asthma education, when they are provided by community health workers or other qualified professionals. In-home education to reduce asthma triggers—pets, smoking, dust, and mold—has been shown to reduce ER visits and hospitalizations, but it still isn’t covered by most insurers and too many people with asthma currently lack access to these vital services because they are not reimbursed. There is an opportunity for California’s Medi-Cal program to change that.

We’re also making progress on better air-quality policies. Scientific research showing components of air pollution not only exacerbating, but causing asthma has expanded enormously, enabling advocates to push through stronger diesel regulations across the state. Research on mold has also evolved, and California just passed model legislation establishing it as a substandard housing condition, giving local enforcement agencies a clear signal to require owners to fix mold problems.

All of these things are important in the fight against asthma, but our work is not done. Until we see asthma as more than just an unfortunate but inevitable problem facing certain children and families, we will never truly make headway against this complex disease.

For example, as the California Air Resources Board develops a Sustainable Freight Initiative, it should build a healthier, fairer freight system by adopting technical solutions (like electrification) and land-use solutions (like routing trucks out of neighborhoods). The California legislature should pass additional bills to eliminate substandard housing conditions that contribute to poor indoor air quality, including controlling rats and cockroaches, both triggers. We need to ensure that families have access to affordable, safe, and healthy housing that will not make them sick.

Finally, there is climate change, which is being increasingly recognized as a public health issue. The recent drought has increased dust in some communities, while others are seeing that warmer temperatures are raising pollen counts—showing that climate change is already worsening asthma. We need to double down on efforts aimed at slowing the impacts of climate change and its accompanying effects on our air quality and health.

The fact is that asthma is profoundly unfair—and it reflects and magnifies other kinds of inequality in our society. Since asthma is a societal problem, it requires a societal response—in essence, a moral choice. While California benefits financially from having a robust system of importing and moving goods to other parts of the country, we must stand up and say that it can’t occur at the expense of our children’s health. As Silicon Valley bolsters the Bay Area economy, we can’t let that translate into families being forced into unhealthy housing conditions because they can’t afford anything else. There are numerous other examples. If we as a society keep choosing financial benefit above health, we’ll end up paying with the health of our most vulnerable residents.

California is certainly not losing the battle against asthma, but if we’re honest we’ll admit we’re not yet winning it either. We simply haven’t made enough of the choices—the policy and systems changes—that we’ll need to make. There are plenty of opportunities before us, and our efforts can make a difference for the 5 million Californians diagnosed with asthma. But it’s going to take all of us working together for the long-term.

The post Every Asthma Attack Is Its Own Perfect Storm appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I finish high school, I hope to move to Japan and join a famous taiko group called Kodo. But before I can do that I have to get through middle school and into high school. So I practice every day. Sometimes I work by myself, but I also have group practices with Sonoma County Taiko and another group called Oh-In Taiko in Richmond. Every other week I practice with a Japanese traditional dance troupe called Ensohza Minyoshu. All in all, I play taiko drums about 15 hours a week in addition to playing in my middle school’s band and jazz ensemble. I never go any length of time without practicing—even if I’m too sick to play, I listen to taiko on my iPod.

Taiko has made me powerful. Not to brag, but since I started hitting the drums, I’ve become one of the strongest kids in gym class. But I‘m also becoming powerful in a different way. When I stand with my legs wide and grounded, with my knees bent—in position to hit the drums—I feel confident and proud. I can display my emotions loudly through the drum. After they see me play, guys often say, “I don’t want to mess with you.” I like that! When I’m not playing, I’m short and young and I usually get ignored.

In school, I’m pretty goofy. I don’t talk about taiko because to me it’s serious, and the other kids don’t like to talk about serious things. They don’t understand how I love taiko or why I want to go to Kodo instead of college, and so I’ve lost many school friends.

But through taiko I’ve made friends outside of school, and many of them are adults. They all take music seriously. Taiko is a community that anyone can join—as long as you can play the drums and work with the group. My mother started playing taiko before me, and I joined the group when I was 9. Now we always go to practices together. When we perform, she is always behind or in front of me so our eyes never meet, but it is fun to poke her with my elbows.

Taiko originated in Japan, and we usually perform in Japanese clothes, but I don’t think of it as an exclusively Japanese thing; it’s really just music. I was born in the U.S., and my parents were born in Japan, so I speak both English and Japanese. But even if I didn’t speak either language I could still join a taiko group, because the music and the other musicians will help you learn what is important to understand.

Taiko drummers are connected to each other by the beat. Before I begin, I plant my legs, grab my sticks, and say a one-syllable word to myself to focus my energy. I remind myself that I am really happy to play the taiko at this moment because no one can ever know what will happen next. Then I raise my arms very slowly and let them fall hard toward the drum.

When you hit the drum correctly, it feels as if the drum is part of you because you use your whole body, and especially your core muscles, like the tanden, an energy center below your belly button. Playing taiko is athletic—sometimes I have to play a whole song in a sit-up position—but most of it is about learning to relax. Something funny happens when I hit the drum: It’s like I’m letting go of something and hitting that “object” into the drum, and then it bounces back at me. I have to control that, or it disappears. When I hit fast, I relax. And the more I relax, the faster I can hit. My hands seem to jiggle by themselves. The moods of a taiko song can be many things: serious, tiring, happy, jumpy, or strong. Hitting the drum and feeling all of these emotions is a lot of work: Sometimes by the end of a concert it feels as if I’ve just run three miles.

Sometimes the drummers yell to give energy to the song and the soloist, and to energize the audience. It’s usually one syllable at a time: “Ha! Yo! Sei! Sa!” Some chants have more syllables, like “Sorya! Sore! Soya!” We’re encouraging the drummers to, “Go, go, go!” Or: “Keep going, don’t give up!”

The sound of these drums connects directly to people. Taiko players want our audience’s hearts to beat to the beat of the Taiko. I have seen babies and young children—and even adults—sleep through concerts despite the fact that they are incredibly loud. They wake up when the applause starts. I think they fall asleep because the taiko reminds them of being close to their mother’s heartbeat.

After every concert, I watch myself play on video. Sometimes I see myself making mistakes. Occasionally I get mad at myself and cry. Sometimes I watch it a few times and realize it wasn’t as bad as I thought. But one thing I’ve learned is that failing makes everything better. When I fail, I can learn from my mistakes. The only way to become successful is to really fail a lot.

Achieving my dream of joining Kodo, the famous taiko group that lives on the island of Sado, will be a rough road. First, you have to apply by reading a book and writing an essay. If that is good enough, you become an apprentice for two years. As an apprentice, you wake up at 4:50 a.m. Before breakfast, you run 6.2 miles and clean the dojo where you practice taiko. Then you eat breakfast. But you don’t eat it the way you normally would, with your right hand. You eat with your left hand so that when you hit the drum, the left hand is as strong the right. Some days are spent doing skits and plays at schools, playing taiko in festivals, gardening or planting rice, or practicing until 10 p.m. In the summer, it is very hot and humid, and there is no air conditioning. In the winter, there is snow and no heat when you wake up. There are no electronics and no dating, because you need to just think about drumming and the group for those two years. In the summer of 2014, only three of the apprentices went on to become members of Kodo. The Kodo members I met warned me that the two years of apprenticeship were the hardest two years of their lives. Many of them had the same dream as I did, but they started very young, at 4 or 5 years old. Most of them said they didn’t get serious until the end of middle school or high school. So if I am going to be the first foreign woman to join Kodo, I have to start now.

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My family lives in a rural, geographically isolated area of Northern California. Del Norte County has just a handful of preschools, and back in 2009, the only two that had space for our son Henry were private religious schools that charged fees. We visited both.

One seemed like a pipeline to factory work: a windowless room where the emphasis was on following directions and “instilling discipline.” My husband and I observed a coloring lesson where kids had to choose a red crayon to color a picture of a Bible bookmark. We watched as one boy was chastised for choosing green. Another boy, no more than three years old, couldn’t sit still and was punished by having to be last in the line to visit the bathroom. “We give them bathroom breaks twice a morning,” the teacher told us while the kids were queueing up. “They learn to go on a schedule.”

We went with the second preschool. It had colorful rooms decorated with art, a nice play yard, and a kindly head teacher who, among other things, let kids go to the bathroom when they needed to.

Henry attended that school for nearly a year, but it wasn’t a good fit for the long run. The kids went to chapel every day and we noticed that Henry was becoming especially worshipful of the pastor. He described how the teacher and the children would open up a special wooden display box somewhere in the sanctuary, look at his picture, and say a prayer. On reflection, it was probably a picture of Jesus, but my son thought it was the pastor, and no one seemed to disabuse him of this notion. Meanwhile, I became a bit suspicious of the good reverend. He met regularly with the children, but his lessons seemed to be especially political. Henry would report his views back to us. For example, it was wrong for men to marry other men, and Buddhists misguidedly “worshipped Buddha.”

We weren’t the only family with concerns. My friend Geneva was worried about her daughter, Temaia. “She gets confused by the doctrine,” Geneva complained. “She told me that Jesus doesn’t like it when you vacuum in the afternoon.”

I never said, “We need to start a movement for a better preschool in our community.” I just kept running into parents with the same problem. One set of parents was Jewish. They didn’t want their four- year-old to attend a religious school, but they couldn’t afford a nanny. Two physician friends could afford a nanny, but they wanted their son to get more socialization. Another friend was a single parent who needed a school that accepted childcare subsidies, but she didn’t think that the one she qualified for offered a very creative, student-centered curriculum.

It soon became clear that we could keep complaining, or we could work together to make something happen.

We started having meetings—sometimes at the local Family Resource Center; sometimes in each other’s homes. We wrote down ideas on flipcharts, and debated options: A co-op day care? A home day care? An elaborate nanny share? But when the dozen or so of us agreed on a vision for a full-scale, all-day preschool, we knew we had to look for a partner organization. The Del Norte Child Care Council, which at the time focused on afterschool care and in-home child care licensing, had a director who was interested in expanding their services—and the council co-owned a building with an available classroom. After a dramatic meeting with a reluctant DNCCC Board—which had never seen members of the community turn out in such numbers—the partnership was born.

The next step was funding. The parents group worked hard on a proposal for a grant from the California Endowment. Our idea for a small school soon became a vision for changing the community’s norms, empowering parents, and reforming education. The idea for a “Preschool Without Walls” was born: Our preschool would be more than a classroom. It would be a center for home-schooling parents, networked families, playgroups, and student teachers to exchange practical ideas for early childhood education. Our preschool would move the needle towards better education at all levels.

That was the dream, and that dream was still alive when the Little School of the Redwoods—a name our kids chose in a vote—opened in 2011. It was our area’s first Montessori and Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool, combining two innovative teaching methods: self-directed independent learning activities in the morning and child-led group projects in the afternoon. Little School was also the first private pay, non-religious preschool in our county. The parents’ organization—now named the Parents’ Advisory Group (PAG)—helped interview new teachers, select and gather books and materials, and dig a garden.

But since the opening, the road has been very, very rough. Most of the original PAG parents involved in the effort moved away for better jobs or to be closer to family. Some of them never got to send their kids to the school. They aged out before it opened. Others carried on for a while. The PAG continued to meet, but most original members—including me—felt we had earned a rest. And I was pregnant with my second kid and didn’t have time to stay involved.

Now, in 2015, I’m the only founding PAG parent left with a child in the school. Our son Theo has been attending for over two years now.

The quality of the education is still pretty good. But the “Preschool Without Walls” dream—a preschool that offered training experiences and knowledge sharing to the larger community—never really materialized. There was no one to pick up the work at the DNCCC. The funder didn’t follow up with that part of the proposal, and new parents on board didn’t want to devote the energy or time to fight battles they saw as someone else’s.

The PAG has dwindled in power and influence. What was once an organization that provided vision and direction for the school has become a fundraising group that does raffles and jewelry sales. Its members don’t know that the PAG once participated in hiring staff and amending the handbook. Now the PAG is so disempowered, it can’t even get the billing office to accept credit cards to pay monthly tuition.

To be fair, the DNCCC, our partner organization, has good reasons for being disappointed with us. The school’s finances have been in the red. Parents, the council complained, just don’t get involved.

But as I reflect on the effort to create and sustain the Little School of the Redwoods, I have to catch myself from slipping into negative thinking. This is a lesson about the success of a social movement, not its failure. It is hard to organize parents, but we did it. Our principle goal was achieved: the school is here.

Meanwhile, those original parents who remained in the community have gone on to organize other movements—bigger ones. One mom now leads our local community food council and has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to improve our food systems. Another parent from our group created a recycling movement across the school district, saving what now amounts to over a million dollars—and preventing millions of tons of waste from going to the landfill. One founding school parent now serves on the Library Board, orchestrating slow but meaningful reform in a once defunct system where the board chairman did not even have a library card. One couple who moved away is moving back—the husband will help local tribes better invest their money, and the wife will be doing broad-based community development work with a local foundation. They have a new baby, too, who will eventually go to Little School of the Redwoods. The circle of change continues.

As for myself, I’ve stayed interested in education reform, particularly how we might improve after- school programs in our area, despite cutbacks from the school district. Right now, I’m just casually talking to parents when they have a minute, and attending a few meetings. I have a better sense now of how things get done. Which is probably why I hesitate. I know it’s going to be another long road. I also know that it’s not likely to happen unless enough people with a shared interest get together with a flipchart.

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Santa Ana has become a first stop for immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America. It is also home to many Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s. The city is now about 80 percent Latino and 10 percent Southeast Asian. Fifty percent of our community is foreign-born. The downtown area, where the library is located, is a yeasty mix of trendy restaurants and businesses serving immigrants—both turbulent and exciting.

Libraries strive to reflect and enhance their communities, and the Santa Ana Public Library has moved to support our changing community, so we’re serving both the people eating at the trendy new restaurants and those eating at traditional taquerías and carnicerías. We use demographic stats to identify overall needs based on a cultural and economic picture, and we talk to individuals in the library about what they’d like to see in programming and materials.

Efforts to adapt to the changing interests of Santa Ana residents became more difficult after the Great Recession arrived in 2008, bringing fiscal crisis to the city—and the library. The per capita expenditure for our public library was already among the lowest in the state at $11.07, and it decreased even further. We didn’t have funds to buy new books or materials. We had to reduce hours at one branch. We had to contemplate reducing the number of story times and other programs for children and youth.

We didn’t want the community to feel short-changed, so we, with support from our director Gerardo Mouet, began to apply for grants. We had so many ideas for new services and programs, but we needed more funding.

Teen historians from the Santa Ana Library with Gonzalo Mendez, Jr., who was one of the children involved in a landmark 1940s lawsuit challenging the segregation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans into separate schools in Orange County.

Not really believing our application had a chance, we applied for a grant in the 2010 Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. It came as a surprise to be awarded $636,000 over three years to develop bilingual librarians. Since 1996, we have required that all public desk staff be bilingual in either Spanish or Vietnamese, and translated all signs and communications. Now, with the grant, we can pay bilingual young people from the community to work in the library, support their undergraduate and graduate education, and teach them the skills they need to become librarians in a diverse community.

We like “raising our own” librarians. Three of our four managing librarians grew up in the community, and started as pages or volunteers in the library. “Locally grown” librarians understand the community and have the gift of making immigrant families feel comfortable and welcome. They also are guides and can help us to create collections and services that answer needs in the community. Our youth services librarian, who grew up in the city and has been with the library through high school, college, and graduate school, has developed a K-12 bilingual tutoring program, including a science institute and intensive math tutoring in the summer. She also has created an award-winning Dia de los Ninos, Dia de los Libros (Day of the Children, Day of the Books) program. The event—a celebration of families, literacy, and bilingualism—attracts between 1,500 and 2,000 attendees every year.

Encouraged, we’ve applied for a variety of federal grants that have allowed us to increase programming, particularly for young people. We now host programs to train at-risk youth in digital media skills, including digital music, graphic design, and web design. We have an active, after-school tutoring program that focuses on kids with learning problems, and a Teen Historian program that trains teens to collect oral histories from their immigrant parents or grandparents, while helping them to understand their families’ struggles to settle in a new country and adapt to a new culture.

Last year, we started Memories of Migration to build on the Teen Historian program. The idea is to develop cultural heritage collections based on the shared stories of human migration in America. Teens find members of the immigrant community with stories to tell, collect artifacts, and record their experiences. Techniques developed by the library will be tested in model programs operated by four libraries and agencies that serve immigrant communities in Connecticut, New York, and New Mexico.

Every day, Santa Ana Public Library staff serves a variety of people with equally varying needs. Teens and tweens hang out with friends in the TeenSpace, men and women come in to get help with resumes and job hunting, and people of all ages visit our Tech Desk to get one-on-one help with technology or to take bilingual computer classes. Hundreds of people use our computer labs to job hunt, complete job certifications, and communicate with relatives far away, supported by bilingual computer tutors. The library has become a supportive second home for Santa Ana teens (including an unusually high number of boys). It is a place where they can develop self esteem and a sense of value to their community by gaining skills, mentoring younger children, and becoming advocates for the needs of their parents and grandparents through the city’s Youth Civic Engagement program.

Recognition has followed: in 2014, were one of 12 recipients of the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award. We’ve also received recognition from the city of Santa Ana, which, in addition to increasing our funding, has asked us to create an “e-library” (a kind of electronic petting zoo where people can try tablets, e-books, and 3-D printing) in a proposed community center. We are a major player in the city’s Five-Year Strategic Plan. Our task is to reach out to Santa Ana’s young people to involve them in civic life. We look forward to continuing to adapt to our community’s shifting needs.

I have enjoyed observing the changes that have come about in libraries, reveling both in the rise of technology and the persistence of the written word. Libraries remain places where everyone can find information, a calm place to hang out, a window into the past, and a path to the future.

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The Richmond Plunge is one of the most beautiful indoor swimming pools in the nation, and at $5 for a day pass, a visit is cheaper than a Big Mac. It is right in front of a major bus line. But most of the black and brown Richmond residents I work with don’t think the Plunge is for them. At most, they might take their kids to the Plunge once a year on a Saturday Family Swim Day, and if they are brave enough to wear a bathing suit, they will splash around in the shallow end. Almost no one—parent or kid—knows how to swim, and no one is going to the deep end.

But that’s not the only barrier keeping certain people from the Plunge. There’s a lack of money and time. And beyond that, there’s a lack of motivation—feeling isolated and stuck in your neighborhood, your body, and your situation. Fear of the water, fear of being out of place, and fear of looking foolish get transmitted from parent to child. These barriers add up to an unhealthy community, where large groups of people might suffer from obesity, depression, fear, and distrust.

I started as a community organizer in Richmond nine years ago. I come from a similar background to many of the people I work with: I am an African-American parent, and I’ve been on my own since I was 18. I know how little things can be a big hurdle. So, I had been building trust with the Navigators for six months, doing things like driving one woman around to get the documents she needed to sign her kids up for school.

When the community nonprofit Richmond Swims got a grant to offer adult swim lessons and chose the Navigators to be the first participants, I did my best to help the Navigators clear the hurdles. I helped the ladies fill out the paper work. I got some fees waived. I promised rides to get them to the Plunge. And for three months before the lessons started in October, we talked about them, learning who loved the water (two women), who didn’t mind walking around in the water (a few women), and who was deathly afraid of water because of a traumatic childhood experience (a few more).

On the first day we all went into the locker rooms and changed into our suits (mostly provided by Richmond Swims, along with swim caps and goggles for everyone), passing the women from the Masters Swim training, who were toned and strong in their Speedo racer suits. Our little group was feeling shy, our mom bellies pooching out. The Latino ladies were trying to get their long hair in the caps, and the African-American ladies were wearing two caps, to make sure their hair did not get wet.

When we walked out on deck, I was surprised to see that we were the only ones in the pool besides the lifeguards and Coach B, our instructor. We could relax without being distracted by kids splashing or people staring. Coach B asked us to sit on the edge of the pool and put our feet in, kick, and slide in. She had us walk the length of the pool, and finally we held hands in a circle and bobbed our heads under water. Holding hands was key. The ladies who were not afraid to go under were able to support the ladies who were.

One woman was deathly afraid: getting in a pool was Gloria’s worst nightmare. She is about 70 years old, and she also suffers from depression. On that first day, just walking the length of the pool was terrifying: She was crying and shaking. Coach was on one side of her, and her sister was on the other, and they were practically carrying her. I didn’t think she would stay in the water, but she did. She walked across the length of the pool again and again, becoming less afraid each time; all the while the Navigators cheered her on. At the end of the first lesson, no one wanted to get out of the water. I knew right then that this experience was going to be about more than exercise or learning a new skill.

The pool was a place of vulnerability. We had to allow ourselves to be vulnerable in front of each other and in front of Coach B, a stranger. But would Gloria have stepped into the pool on her own? Would any of us have done it on our own? No, but together we were a team. By going to the place of her deepest fear with the group, Gloria also was able to believe that she was not alone at a school meeting with the principal for her grandkids, or talking to the housing agency.

Everyone came back for the next lesson and the next, and many completed not just the six we had originally signed up for but 18 lessons. At the pool they had to let go of the edge, to put their heads under water, learn how to float. What would happen if they trusted the water to hold them? The unfamiliar is scary. Getting rid of a barrier is scary, because it also means an excuse is gone. The Navigators could now say yes to the pool, the beach, the lake. Having one more thing to say yes to means there is a greater chance you will say yes to the next challenge, be it lose 20 pounds, or learn to read, or send your child to sleepaway camp.

A year later, at a camp for caregivers and their families run by YES, I could see how our time at the Plunge had changed not just the Navigators but their families. At a swim lesson taught by Coach B, the women got in the water with their children, swam, and helped their children learn to swim. They were no longer sitting on the sidelines.

This past year, Navigators have signed up to go back to school, and are teaching everything from diabetes workshops to ZUMBA classes at their local school. They are going to Richmond Food Policy Council meetings and addressing school board members at district meetings. That’s what a healthy community looks like—no longer isolated, or afraid—everyone jumps in the pool.

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