TEAMS has developed its most sophisticated cadre of self-reliant resident leaders in two diverse communities in the San Francisco Bay Area: the Monument Corridor in Concord and Bayview/Hunter’s Point (BVHP) in San Francisco. Both are among the Bay Area’s most impoverished neighborhoods and both communities are growing, with an influx of Asian and Latino immigrants, with displacement of a previously prominent African American population in BVHP. TEAMS is now expanding into California’s Central Valley working with Community Partnership for Families of San Joaquin (CPF) and their network of family resource centers in five under-served, low-income neighborhoods in Stockton and Lodi.

The Monument Corridor, Concord, CA

This neighborhood is a vibrant, diverse, but severely under-resourced community in the heart of Concord, where according to the 2000 U.S. census, 63% of residents are low income and more than 40% are very low income. The neighborhood has become a portal community for new immigrants, including many who are undocumented. Over the last decade, the population has shifted from primarily white to majority Latino; and Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American and African American populations are rising. In addition, the number of children living in poverty in the neighborhood more than doubled, and the community experienced larger numbers of people seeking work at lower skill and wage levels.

• In 1999, TEAMS was invited by the Monument Community Partnership (MCP) to integrate residents into the partnership, a comprehensive, diverse, resident-led collaborative of public and private non-profit agencies. TEAMS introduced its SAT model and fundamentally changed the partnership to be a resident-led collaborative, which has had a real impact in key areas that affect poverty in the Monument Community, including health, housing, economic development and education. For example:
• Residents help produce an annual health fair and major community celebrations that regularly engage more than 1000 residents and they helped to establish a highly utilized Mobile Health Clinic.
• Anglo Seniors read to Latino children in English, and teach ESL to day laborers, while seniors and other residents lead a community collaboration with city, county and nonprofit transportation agencies to redesign the Monument’s inadequate public transportation services.
• SAT members helped to establish the Day Labor Center, and its successor, Monument Futures, a community-driven economic development center.
• SAT members were hired as community consultants by the Department of Social Services to design and conduct a Child Welfare Redesign survey process, interviewing 640 families in 3 weeks, far exceeding expectations in amount and quality of information gathered, as other partnerships throughout the county averaged 75 interviews.

The SAT leaders have been recognized for their accomplishments:

• SATs and other MCP members received the San Francisco Foundation’s Koshland Civic Unity Award in 2003, leveraging $300,000 for the neighborhood.
• MCP was selected by the Contra Costa First Five Commission to receive a $1.2 million grant to develop a Family Resource & Learning Center.

As an extension of its SAT model, TEAMS developed a Financial Action Community Team (FACT) in the Monument Corridor for resident leaders to gain in-depth knowledge about how to leverage capital to build individual and community wealth. Members of the FACT created a strategy for income generation by investing their own money in the purchase and rehabilitation of real estateTen percent of the profit from this investment will be used to start the first Community Capital Pool.

Bayview/Hunter’s Point (BVHP), San Francisco

The Bayview/Hunter’s Point (BVHP) neighborhood is located in the southeastern part of San Francisco with a population of 33,170. It is an historically marginalized community of color, suffering from the burden of poverty, violence, chronic diseases, environmental pollution and high rates of school failure. African Americans comprise about 48 percent of the population, down from 73 percent in 1980, and Asians account for approximately 25 percent, up from 8 percent in 1980. Thirty percent of the residents are under the age of 18 and 11 percent are over the age of 65. More than 30 percent are immigrants, and one-third of these immigrants have moved to the U.S. since 1990, most coming from China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Mexico and Guatemala.

In 2002, TEAMS established a 10-member SAT composed of BVHP residents who are leaders in their fields, including family and senior advocacy, teaching, counseling, and youth development. Members are from diverse ages and backgrounds, including African American, Chinese, and Samoan. These SAT members have formed their own teams to address critical issues in the neighborhood and have begun to draft a financial strategy to leverage and sustain their work:

• Student Leaders for Health and Violence Prevention: a youth SAT focusing on diabetes and asthma prevention in a school and community- based setting primarily with Samoans and Pacific Islanders. In addition, the youth SAT will increase awareness and participation of young people in combating violence and other threats to their community.
• Mothers Against Crime: a team of mothers and grandmothers from rival gang areas formed a walking patrol to help stop death and injury from rampant gun violence

The SAT has developed new relationships with the local County Supervisor’s office, police sub-station, Mayor’s Office for Criminal Justice, the United Way of the Bay Area, the Housing Authority and tenant’s association, and has devised a long range plan for BVHP . TEAMS’ program in BVHP involves assisting senior homeowners through seniors teaching transferable job skills to young adults such as minor home repair, landscaping, yard cleaning, carpentry, and painting. In turn, these young adults will mentor and coach youth in after-school programs. This cross-generational activity will begin to build trusting relationships between the seniors and the young adult workers.

Once this trust is established, it will also lead to the ability to retain one of BVHP’s greatest assets in the hands of the community: its large percentage of owner-occupied homes. The long range plan calls for a reverse mortgage strategy, keeping the housing stock in the hands of the community.Ultimately, it creates a climate in which a greater number of residents are able to compete in the economic opportunities coming to their neighborhood. In addition, small, locally-owned businesses will have been created, and the groundwork laid for potential leveraging of real estate and establishing a community pool of funds.

San Antonio District, Oakland

The San Antonio district is a diverse, largely new immigrant low-income neighborhood between Lake Merritt and the Fruitvale district in Oakland. 53% of the residents are foreign born and 40% speak Spanish and 27% speak an Asian language as their primary language. TEAMS has been working in this area for more than three years. However, TEAMS’ staff members and three of the initial core group left the area; One of our trained facilitators continued working with us and she has proven to be an exceptionally able community builder. Over the past 18 months, she has been building a base of emerging parent leaders at Garfield elementary school. All are immigrant, Spanish speaking residents of the San Antonio district; none had previous experience working as community leaders. A few had attended one or two parent meetings at the school, but none had ever spoken. From this group of parents, the SAT was able to get three elected to the school site council where they took a very active role in defining how resources could best be used to benefit the community. The San Antonio SAT:

• Helped to plan Garfield’s school renovation project, learning skills of budgeting and negotiating. They created and administered a parent survey to get community involvement, and helped to select and purchase new equipment.
• Worked hard to improve parent coordination with staff, to make Garfield school parent friendly. They convinced the school administration to use one consistent translator, instead of multiple translators, so that this person now serves as a bridge between the school and the community.
• Many of the monolingual immigrant parents were unable to attend ESL classes because they were working. The SAT got funding to buy audiotapes for these parents to learn English and set up a lending library, so that the tapes are in constant use.
• They created and coordinated a number of community events, to start to break down parents’ isolation.
• Established a system to allow pre-school age children who did not qualify for Headstart to enroll for kindergarten 1 week early to ease their transition to school.
• Formed a weekly exercise class, creating clear goals for exercise and healthy eating and holding one another accountable to these goals.

Stockton and Lodi, San Joaquin County

San Joaquin County is located approximately 70 miles east of the San Francisco Bay Area and immediately south of Sacramento County. The City of Stockton, with a population of approximately 250,000, is the county seat. The County has a rapidly growing population of over 650,000. Indeed, overall growth here is more than a third faster than the rest of the state, with some areas experiencing particularly fast growth. The County is a diverse community, with growing Hispanic (currently approaching 30 percent of all residents) Southeast Asian (almost 10 percent of all residents), South Asian, and African American communities. As an agricultural, semi-rural community, services are concentrated in just a few areas—and usually far from the people that need them most. Poor access to services compounds pronounced economic, health, social, educational, and public safety needs

In 2004, TEAMS started a 6-month training of trainers for the SAT model, partnering with Community Partnership for Families of San Joaquin (CPF), a network of grassroots family resource centers. CPF is focusing on helping families "climb the economic ladder," which includes: (1) family asset development (for home buying, business development, and education); (2) support to families making the transition from welfare to work; and (3) other forms of financial assistance and income support to families living in poverty. Although service integration bridges the gaps between programs and eliminates navigational barriers for families, it is only one component in promoting self-determination. Another component is self-organizing to build capacity within the community. Partnering with TEAMS is enabling CPF to obtain this missing component. Those who have been trained by TEAMS are now starting their own SATs.

We are seeking funding to begin to implement our Financial Action Community Teams in Stockton and Lodi in the coming fiscal year.