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11
street roots
Education * Dialogue * Independence
VISIONS, from page 1
Education Project spoke of receiving a VIA
grant and being invited to City Hall.
For the first time, day laborers
participated in a conversation at City Hall,”
Sosa said. It started a dialogue where we
were able to talk to people who saw us as a
menace and show them that we are human
beings.”
The testimony served as evidence that
the massive VisionPDX process - which
collected the input of nearly 17,000
Portlanders about their vision for the Rose
City in 2030 — had achieved one of its stated
goals: “To open up government to all
Portlanders, particularly to
underrepresented groups and communities.”
Despite the waves of testimonies, the city
has determined that the program will no
longer be a city-funded iniative.
Not all is lost for VIA, however. The
Regional Research Institute for Human
Services at Portland State University’s
School of Social Work has agreed to both
house VIA and be the program’s fiscal
sponsor. The move, effective June 30, is
unexpected but not without precedent, said
Stephanie Stephens, VIA’s program
manager.
“VisionPDX worked with the Survey
Research Lab at PSU on data for the
project,” said Stephens, “and [faculty
members] from PSU werereallykey people
in VisionPDX. It seemed like a logical place
[for VIA] so when they stepped up we said,
‘great!’” |
/
Stephens said that “when Council passed
the VIA resolution in 2008, it specified that
the organization would be independent from
the city within three years. We will be soon,,
but nobody expected it to happen so
quickly.”
Despite their excitement about’VlA’s
continuation at PSU, some VIA grantees still
feel abandoned by City Hall, marking an
ironic end to a relationship that began with
community groups feeling embraced and
accepted by their local leaders.
Mardine Mao, president of the
Cambodian American Community of Oregon
(CACO) and a 2008 VIA grantee, said it was
“painful to hear” of VIA’s elimination from
the Mayor’s proposed budget
“To eliminate the program completely,
breaks the trust with the community,” said
Mao. “If they just made a cut to it, I could
understand, but ...now there’s a disconnect,
it seems like they [City Hall] don’t believe in
the vision.”
Mao, who worked with her CACO
colleagues to create an oral history project
that connects Cambodian-American youth to
LATINO OBAMA from page 10
the first two,” says René Vega, a retired
soldier. That’s plainly not true, but the
government has introduced free education
and medical, care.
More than 100,000 subsidized houses
have been built. The minimum wage was
increased by 15 per cent and benefit
payments to the poor doubled from $15'to
$30 a month (the Ecuadorian currency
adopted the U.S. dollar in 2000). “They call
it 21st century socialism,” says Carol
Murillo, deputy director of the government-
run newspaper El Telégrafo. “It’s really
normal capitalism with wider social
program.”
In Ecuador’s hospitals, the problems go
back years. “Under (former president) Lucio
Gutiérrez, we’d ask for new equipment timé
after time. And they’d always say that it was
on its way. But there was no budget: if a
doctor died, no one was hired to replace
him. At first we got angry, then we just
resigned ourselves to it,” says Manuel
Jimenez, a gynecologist in the Amazon
region. -,
A colleague adds: “They’d increase our : I
salaries, but we didn’t have the tools to do
our work.”
Little surprise, then, that the
inatiguration of new facilities at their
•
PHO TO BY KEN H A W K IN S W W W .K E M H A W K IN S .C O M
A supporter o f the Visions in Action program signs a card to display in a rally fo r the
Program. The city cut funding fo r Visions in Action this month for the short-livedporgram
that was widely popular among participants.
their parents’ stories of surviving the deadly
Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s, said that
the VIA grant helped her community to
heal.
“These stories ‘needed to be heard,” said
Mao. *A lot of our community suffers
becauseof our history and what we’ve been
through. Some have witnessed executions
and family deaths, and it’s very traumatizing
for some individuals. It’s also harder for
them to communicate. But this oral history
allows them to engage the youth and help
them really understand. It brings the family
closer.
“To see a teenage boy break down and
cry because of hearing his mom’s story - for
the first time in his life - is very powerful,”
Mao added. “It kind of humanized the adults
to the youth.”
For a generation of Cambodians who fled
a murderous regime, trust in government
does not come easily.
“We’ve developed a mentality of not
trusting leaders,” said Mao, “so for us to be
able to get $10,000 from the,city ... kind of
restored our faith in government and
politics. We owe our gratitude to the city for
believing in us.”
At the same time, however, Mao is
dismayed by thé city’s decision to cease
funding for VIA.
“I realize we’re in tough economic times,
but I didn’t think this whole program would
be streamlined,” Mao said/“I think the city
hospital ends with cries of “Viva Correa!”
Had the equipment arrived a month earlier,
one doctor observes, it would have saved
several lives. Getting stuff done in Ecuador
requires more than just political will. All too
often it requires leadership right from the
top, and Correa is a known micro-manager.
It’s not always pretty — ministers reportedly
leave his office in tears, while the press is
moved out of hearing range of his tirades —
but it is done with an unusual competence.
Even a World Bank official, whose boss 8
has been kicked out of the country by
Correa, has praise for the president. “The
IMF’s been recommending for 20 years that
there should be a single treasury account
(to help planning). Which president goes
and does it? Correa.” That’s probably an
endorsement a nationalist leader could da
without.
Correa has also communicated better
than any previous president what he’s doing
and why. On Saturday mornings he hosts a
lengthy radio show and he’s prone to
dashing around the country in one of the
Ecuadorian-army’s very few helicopters.
Nearly 40 percentof Ecuador’s population
live in poverty, and income distribution
remains appallingly unequal.
The one social group solidly against him
is the upper-middle class, particularly in the1
economic powerhouse of Guayaquil. They
object not only to taxes on the rich to pay
for social services, but also to the
centralization of power by the president ?
The old political elite may have been
rotten, but can one arrogant man replace it?
Nor is everyone on the left happy. One of
Correa’s initial allies, Alberto Acosta, left
the government over its insistence on
promoting mining in some of the country’s
mostbiodiverse areas.
“Some members of the government think
that, with a higher oil price, the economic
problems will go away. They won’t,” he says.
“We have to go beyond a model of just
extracting resources.”
Correa sometimes seems more interested
in punishing U.S, companies than in
ensuring environmental damage doesn’t
recur. Communities have lost the right to
block extraction of oil and other resources,
as the government looks hungrily for
revenues for its social spending.
Now the head of Ecuador’s leading
environmental NGO, Ivonne Ramos,
predicts “high levels: of social conflict” as
the government tries to push through
mining projects. Mining captures Correa’s
complicated relationship with the country’s
indigenous population.
On the one hand, he has shown respect
for indigenous symbolism^ On the other, he
has sought to discredit the indigenous
didn’t really understand what the project
meant to us.”
Laurie Powers, the executive director of
PSU’s Regional Research Institute, has been
in contaet with VIA staffers since last fall,
when School of Social Work faculty member
Bowen MeBeath was working with VIA on a
grant application. Powers met with
McBeatii, Stephens and VIA staffer Cassie
Cohen to learn more about the program,
and “it gave me opportunity to get to know
the initiative and appreciate its importance
in the community,” Powers said.
“When we heard that VIA wasn’t going to
he funded,” Powers continued, “we stepped
up to provide them space and support, and
look for opportunities to partner with them,
on future grants. (The Regional Research
Institute) is providing a bridge for VIA to ,
maintain some identity and activity through
this period until they can establish
themselyes as an independent organization.”
While the institute will provide VIA with
office space, a computer and phone, and
access to all of PSU’s facilities, “we’re
funded by grants ourselves> so we can’t
really control what money willgo to VIA,” ,
said Powers. “[Fiscal sponsorship] just
means that the City is willing to transfer the
dollars left over for VIA to (the institute)
and allowing them to realize those funds.”
In other words, fiscial sponsorship does not
equal steady funding for VIA.
VIA has between $30,000-$40,000 in
savings left over from its current fiscal year
budget which can be transferred to the
institute and used as the program
transitions out of the city’s jurisdiction.
Stephens admits, however, that despite the
PSU partnership VIA’s future is still
uncertain, s
“It remains to be seen,” said Stephens.
“The coalition now has to really think about
what to do as a group. ”
Stephens and fellow VIA staff members J
will lose their jobs, but pledge to remain
Involved with VIA’s evolution without pay.
“When I took this job, I wasn’t looking; I
had a job that I loved,” Stephens recalled.
“But I really felt strongly about VIA, and as
part of VisionPDX I had seen the work on
the ground and seen what a difference it has
made in the community. I’m not going to
stop now.” .
While VIA will no longer be funded by the
city, the Office of Human Relations would be
funded permanently, Mayor Sam Adams
said. Created in 2008, the office works on
civil and human rights issues, and houses
the city’s Human Rights Commission.
“We will have a continued focus on
increasing diversity of public outlook and
input,” Adams said.
r
leaders — satirised as golden ponchos — for
tolerating thp neo-liberal reforms of
previous governments.
' Meañwhile, as higher, food prices pinch,
there is some nostalgia for past présidents.
In the cities, unemployment is rising.
Hundreds of workers head out onto the -
pavements at daWn, hoping that someone
will pick them up for a day’s labour. “It must
be the president’s fault,” says one, an out-of­
luck plumber.
So will "it all end in disillusion? “That’s
happened before because of Ecuador’s
structural condition as a place of instability
and inequality,” says pollster Pérez. There’s
little doubt that Ecuadorians make a
demanding electorate.
One watch-repairer — a member of
Correa’s party - told me in all seriousness
that the president could count on his vote
only if he personally listened to a complaint
about a motoring fine and came to a
performance of his music group.
. Forthe moment, however, no Ecuadorian
president has been as ambitious of as-,
popular as Correa. Revolution or not, it is
his to throw away.
Reprinted from Big Issuue in Scotland N 8 g
Street News Service: www.street-papers.
org. -