Equal Voice for America's Families campaign starts Saturday in San Juan
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| Rev Mike Seifert |
SAN JUAN, January 18 - Residents living in Cameron Park, the biggest colonia in the country, only got their streets paved after they started to show up in large numbers at the polls.
The Rev. Mike Seifert, of San Felipe de Jesus Catholic Church, says hundreds of thousands of working families across America can get the same positive response from the 2008 presidential candidates if, as he believes it will, the Equal Voices for America’s Families campaign is a success.
“Democracy offers great possibilities but you have to participate. As we have found in Cameron Park, you can bring about a sea change by participating in the voting process,” Seifert said.
Seifert and his church are playing a major role in the Equal Voices campaign in the Rio Grande Valley. The year-long project is an effort by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and its 200-plus non-profit grantees to build support for a national family-issues platform created and advanced by working families.
The campaign launches Saturday with a town hall meeting at La Unión del Pueblo Entero’s headquarters in San Juan, starting at 8.30 a.m.
“At the end of the day, this is about democracy. It’s about pulling together families across the nation and giving them a voice,” Seifert said. “This is a chance for us to bring our experiences, through the different colonias, together in order to get politicians to respond.”
Equal Voices campaign organizers say the national politicians are not responding sufficiently right now. Nearly a third of America’s families earn less than 200 percent of the poverty rate - about $40,000 for a family of four.
“All I have heard from both Republican and Democratic candidates is that they represent change,” said Ann Cass, executive director of Proyecto Azteca, a Marguerite Casey Foundation grantee in San Juan and a campaign sponsor.
“Well, we want to make sure that the change they are talking about is going to address the change that working poor and low income families need. This will be a chance for people who rarely have an opportunity, to have their voice heard.”
Among the issues likely to comprise the Equal Voices national platform are affordable housing, subsidized childcare, living wages, universal health care, and quality education.
Along with Proyecto Azteca, other Valley non-profits participating in Equal Voices are LUPE, ARISE, AVANCE, the Azteca Community Loan Fund, the Brownsville Community Health Center, the Community Action Council of South Texas, Colonias Unidas, Proyecto Digna, Proyecto Libertad, SCAN (Serving Children and Adolescents in Need), the South West Workers Union, Su Casa de Esperanza, and Texas RioGrande Legal Aid.
Seifert said the colonia residents of Cameron Park will play their part in Equal Voices when the campaign holds an upcoming town hall meeting in Brownsville. Rio Grande City will also stage a town hall meeting, along with the three South Texas College campuses, when the project focuses on young people.
When Seifert and the Rev. Albert Phillip arrived at San Felipe de Jesus in the mid-1990s, there were no paved roads in Cameron Park. When it rained, children had to walk two miles through the mud in order to catch the school bus. Police and Fire services were non-existent.
Phillip and Seifert learned that former Gov. Ann Richards had been able to secure $300,000 to pave Cameron Park’s roads. When they asked why the money had not been spent, Cameron County Judge Gilberto Hinojosa was brutally frank. No one ever votes, he said.
Hinojosa was right. Of the 1,500 registered voters, only 152 voted in 1996. Phillip and Seifert were told that if about 300 people voted, the politicians would pay more attention.
San Felipe de Jesus members block walked. Their non-partisan Get out the Vote effort saw 500 people vote in 1998 and 900 people vote in 2,000.
“We created the perception, and it was pretty close to reality, that we were active,” Seifert said. “The paved roads brought a transformation. The narco gangs were gone, the police came. There was a sea change in this community.”
By way of a bonus, the state then invested $7 million in grants. This time the roads were paved with curbs and gutters. “We didn’t lobby. The money just came out of the air. But it was all because Cameron Park started voting,” Seifert said.
Armando Garza, coordinator of the Equal Voices campaign in South Texas, said that over the next several months, as many as 40 town hall meetings will be held throughout the Casey Foundation’s grant-making regions.
“The campaign will culminate in a multi-city convention on September 6, 2008, when approximately 10,000 families will gather in Los Angeles, CA, Chicago, IL and Birmingham, AL, to ratify the national platform,” Garza said.
The Marguerite Casey Foundation is a private independent grant-making foundation dedicated to helping families strengthen their voice and mobilize their communities. The Foundation is investing $5 million in the Equal Voice for America’s Families campaign.
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