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December 19, 2003
"Andrea Cruz, Southeast Georgia Communities Project"
An interview with Andrea Cruz of the Southeast Georgia Communities Project, and a 2003 Leadership for a Changing World awardee. Questions and answers will appear below starting at 1 pm EST on Friday, December 19. You may ask a question in advance by clicking on the "Submit a Question" button. Due to time constraints, not all questions will be answered. You may need to refresh your screen during the interview to read the most recent responses. Read background Leadership for a Changing World
Thank you for joining us today for Leadership Talks with Andrea Cruz of the Southeast Georgia Communities Project. We're excited to learn more about you and your work.
First question, can you tell us a little about your background and how you started working with migrant farmworkers?
Andrea Cruz
I grew up in Dade City, Florida, the seventh of ten children. My interest in working with people came as a young teen when my dream was to be a teacher. At the age of 17, I got married, and traveled with my husband up the Eastcoast Stream working in agriculture. Returning back from the north, we arrived in Vidalia, Georgia.
In the mid 80's, Vidalia had a small community of farmworkers. At the time, the community was not prepared to face an increase in immigrant workers. Immigrant patients were turned away at clinics due to the lack of interpreters.
In 1991, I was hired as a community organizer with the Georgia Cooperative Health Education Program/Area Health Education Centers in Dublin, Georgia. My duties included organizing health education workshops for migrant farmworkers in a tri-county area, advocating for services and eradicating disparities for the target population. For example, we developed a resource manual to share with clients, and spoke up for students and parents seeking better access to education and health care.
As a community organizer, one of my goals was to establish a community organization to better serve farmworkers. I founded the Southeast Georgia Communities Project, Inc. and, working hard and long hours, this project became my mission. It was the beginning of Latinos having a voice in this community. SEGCP’s goal was, and still is, to bring positive change and better conditions for farmworkers.
Madison
What kind of changes have you seen in your community since you began your work?
Andrea Cruz
I think that throughout the years of being here in this area and accessing services to the providers, let’s say legal and health providers overall, to the general public, the change I’ve seen is a little more acceptance of the Latino community. As time has gone by with me working in the community, the community was not prepared to receive the influx of Latinos in this area. I’d say our numbers have gone up tremendously. I’m beginning to see that they’re beginning to understand the need for bilingual staff in their business, medical facilities, the health department, and the community health centers are beginning to see there is a big need. They’re coming to our organization and wanting to speak with me so I can refer and recommend possible new hires in their facilities, which is very positive to me. I feel that all this has allowed us to not just provide information or provide an employment application, but also to allow us to come into their facilities and educate their staff, give them a little bit of cultural sensitivity, and allowing them to understand the population they’re going to be working with. Allowing us to come into their business or even to speak to the coalition and the Chamber of Commerce and give them information, cultural sensitivity, allowing them to understand the population they’re going to be dealing with is something very positive on our end as a nonprofit in this community and the migrant farmworker population.
Chicago, IL
How have you been able to build bridges among various groups, such as migrant farmworkers, farmers, community members, service providers and lawyers?
Andrea Cruz
In my work, networking is a must. I have a good working relationship with other agencies, businesses, civic groups, farmers, and providers. It is very important to me that my staff understands how important it is to carry ourselves professionally among all of our contacts, clients and the community at large. In many ways, our work is shared with these groups through presentations and information about our agency.
We educate our community as much as our target population. We have been very successful in program development and presentations. Our services go way beyond the groups we educate. They reach homes and, in some cases, universities looking at behavior change and community acceptance as well as migrant lifestyles. Cultural sensitivity workshops are conducted with social workers, health providers, and universities to help with public relations.
Takoma Park, Maryland
Andrea:
Your background piece says that you are working to build bridges with local landowners. I am very interesting in hearing more about your efforts - and successful strategies - in building partnerships with low-resource, African -American landowners in the Deep South - many of whom state the lack of access to a local labor force to be one of their biggest challenges. It seems there is a real opportunity for constructive dialogue between these two under-served groups that could lead to more permanent employmwent opportunities and stronger communities that integrate the strengths and resources of both populations.
Thank you and congratualtions!
Andrea Cruz
To answer this question I’d say that trying to build a bridge between the Latino commnity and the black community has been a very, very difficult position. I have no strategies. The ones that I’ve attempted to try out have not gotten anywhere. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the Latino community is growing so rapidly. There is more threatening feelings towards the black community because of the Latino community, the growth of the Latino community.
One thing I could share is that I attended a Musgrove conference. It was like a retreat for leaders in the state of Georgia. We had Maria Estevez from Washington, D.C., and we had many other great Latino leaders to come in and share their views and to help us. And one thing that we did find is that the black leaders that were there, they stressed the reasons why the black community was so reluctant to become part of the Latino community. One of the reasons is that the black community was coming into our turf, taking over the jobs that belonged to them. There was a lot of stereotypes, there was a lot of prejudice towards the Latinos from the blacks because they felt the Latinos were being worked at a much lower rate, they were at a much cheaper cost to the businesses, and that it was almost like taking the jobs away from the black people who were trying to work at a decent salary. But these people were coming in and taking over at a cheaper rate. That’s why there was so much tension. It was obvious at this conference that there was a lot of distrust and a lot of dislike.
Coming back into here into my community and trying to put together a coalition, bringing together black leaders and Hispanic leaders and workers in this community that are out here working, working with migrant Head Starts, working with migrant education, the Georgia Migrant Health Program, every migrant agency in this area of the state that we surround, bringing these leaders together with the black leaders in our community has been almost impossible. I have taken three or four turns to bring these people together and there’s only two people from the black community who have come together with the four of us. And these two people happen to be big supporters of our organization. One is with Telamon Corporation and the other one is a gentleman who works for the Georgia Department of Labor in McRae, Georgia. So I think overall even though we have not made strides in this, I believe that I will continue moving forward and continue on the challenge to try to find a way to unite these two communities because we have lots of common interests and the same needs that need to be addressed at the state level.
Memphis, TN
Do farmers generally support your work? What has been their reaction to your efforts?
Andrea Cruz
Do the farmers support my work? I’d say they do support my work, like those that do support it we also have those that believe that our organization is strictly for the migrant farmworker communities. They don’t look into the services that we’re providing to the general public. What they see is we go out and do outreach into the labor camps and they see that we only provide health education for the Latino community, but yet they don’t give themselves time to see what other things we’re doing to help the community at large, not just the Latino community. Their doors are open to us. That’s one thing we can’t complain about. We’re allowed to come into their facilities to provide health care with volunteer medical students and physicians that support the work that we’re trying to do. Although we’ve seen a shift in better support and more support from the farmers, we do still have some of those that feel that we really aren’t making a change for the general public or for the community at large. We’re going to have that kind of attitude because the farmers also recognize that we are not just here as a social services organization or a health education and prevention organization. We are here to keep an eye out on them when they don’t want to pay the farmworkers and that’s where there’s a little bit of resistance. The farmworkers are going to come here to complain about nonpayment or their wages not being what they should be and we have to turn around and follow up with the proper authorities.
Los Angeles, CA
Do you have a board of directors? How is that made up? Are migrant workers on your board?
Andrea Cruz
Yes, we do have a board of directors. We have 11 members on our board: 51 percent are migrant farmworkers; that’s 6 of our members are migrant farmworkers and 5 are community leaders, clergy. Right now we’re in the process of reelecting officers, so we’ll be moving out and bringing in. It’s a very strong board, I would say.
The migrant farmworker end of it is very open and very realistic with the issues that we face and how they want us to handle our agency’s services in the community. Because the migrant farmworker community has little or no education, they go through a training process. As we introduce them to their duties as a board member, we take them through a learning process of what a member should do and how they should be part of the decision-making process. We talk to them about the rules, the laws, about their duties and their liabilities as board members. So they become very familiar. By the time they grow out of that third year of being a board member, they’re pretty well educated on the role of a board member. From there they can serve on other boards, like boards of other migrant programs such as Migrant Head Start, Migrant Health. The education will eventually continue and be of some good use to them in the future.
Chicago
I read that SGCP strives to be financially self-sustaining-what practices have you put in place to help you achieve that?
Andrea Cruz
As a nonprofit organization it’s very difficult to say you’re going to find a way to sustain the organization and maintain it without financial issues or problems. One thing we do pay a lot of attention to is that in our mission statement we state clearly that we don’t want our consumers just to be consumers. We want them to be contributors to the efforts of the agency’s needs and service delivery process. Therefore, trying to maintain ourselves with a little cushion, the cushion has to come from the community, trying to get donations from the community, the farmworkers themselves.
Something I’ve been doing for the past three years I’ve bought two extra hours on our Latino radio program and I ask for contributions. You can advertise for contributions to our agency. It’s building a little cushion for us to where if we come into problems with funding, we’ll have something to maintain ourselves for at least six to nine months. Another thing we are seeing is that as time goes by we see that there’s changes in the needs of the services that we’re delivering in our community. We’ve already provided medical interpreting services to our community, to our medical providers. What we will do is we will consolidate two of the major programs and then we will apply for funding for adolescent education, teen program development, which is something that’s becoming a big need in our community.
We’re seeing changes in our community that are becoming a little more demanding for services, and that would be looking at teen violence prevention, gang prevention programs, trying to find a way to outreach to the Latino adolescents in our community whose population is becoming more visible because the children who came here 10 years ago are going into their adolescent age. And as we go through this acculturation process this allows to draw back on ourselves to change the services that we’re providing from just adult health to adolescent health and prevention. There’s more money out there for teen education and teen programs and that would give us a nice outlook on what we would see the future of the organization being five years from now.
Denver, CO
How do you decide what issues are the most important to those you serve?
Andrea Cruz
Outreach is probably our number one way to reach these people when they’re coming into our community. Our strategies there are to go out into the field, to the labor camps and to the packing sheds, and sometimes even into our local Wal-Marts. And my job as executive director has kind of shifted itself from the outreach worker I was before to now managing 11 staff members. I go out and speak to the workers personally in different areas, different locations. We’re in a nine county area. I’ll get in my truck, drive around, and speak to people that I meet, that I see. I come up to new folks who have never heard of our agency, others times I’ll come across regular users of our agency who will tell me a little bit about the services they received from my outreach workers, either their kind help or maybe their rudeness. They’ll be very honest with me. It’s not always a bowl of cherries that harvest. Sometimes we have couple little rotten ones in there. And I bring that back. I bring back the good and I bring back the bad, and we learn from that. Learning from that allows my staff to grow to better serve the population that we’re serving.
Jackson, MS
Can you tell us one of your community success stories?
Andrea Cruz
In our line of work there’s many things that we see in our community, not just with the services that we’re providing to the Latino community, but the insensitivity that comes from the local law enforcement officials. There was a little time there where the law enforcement officials were putting up roadblocks and kind of singling out the Latino drivers. They were stopping them and asking them for green cards and drivers’ licenses and trying to play junior INS deputy. It was a very difficult time for us since we were looking at INS raids during that time a few years ago. What they were doing is the law enforcement officials were confiscating legal documents from these people, legal INS documents because they were assuming that the documents were false. Legal drivers’ licenses were being confiscated because they were living now in Georgia during the onion season. Legally a farmworker can have an out-of-state driver’s license for up to 90 days. The law enforcement officials weren’t practicing the law, they were practicing their own law.
It really frustrated me to have to deal with the issue because I had more and more people very, very concerned about their documents, about their legal resident alien cards and their legal driver’s license. I decided that there wasn’t going to be any local support. I wasn’t going to get local support from the police department or the sheriff’s department. So I went higher and placed a call to the Department of Justice in Atlanta. Lo and behold, we had a guy show up at my doorstep at the office and he came in and took care of the situation for me. They called me up to the sheriff’s department, handed me a stack of documents, and I had to find all the people that I was trying to deliver these documents to, not knowing half of them.
That one story right there kind of allowed the local police department and sheriff’s department to work a little more closely with us and to become a little more sensitive to their idea of legal documentation. I believe that after that incident there was a training that was conducted with the local law enforcement officials on reading legal documents.
Leadership for a Changing World
We have time for one more question.
Andrea, how do you sustain yourself and your staff while working on such difficult issues?
Andrea Cruz
Calgon take us away!! (Just kidding.)
Sometimes it feels like we are in a never-ending journey. I am a very easygoing person, and my attitude is contagious. I believe that my staff understands when they are hired what I look for in a team player. They understand my expectations, beliefs, and attitudes towards service delivery. We come together every other morning for about 15 minutes and talk about the good and the bad things we deal with on a day-to-day basis.
There are times when we have to come together to support one of our team members because she has learned that one of her patients has a serious condition. Emotionally, our jobs take a toll on us, but we have a strong support system.
Leadership for a Changing World
Thank you for joining our discussion today with Andrea Cruz. For more information or to contact Andrea:
Andrea Cruz
Southeast Georgia Communities Project
300 South State Street
Lyons, GA 30436
Phone: 912-526-5451
Fax: 912-526-0089
Email: sega1@pineland.net
Leadership Talks will return in February. Please join us again.
Andrea Cruz
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