Youth Envision and Create a Liberatory Home: Interview with Kate English

One Step a la Vez began in 2008 with a group of teens and founder Lynn Edmonds in the towns of Fillmore and Piru in Ventura County, California. The youth and Ms. Edmonds wanted to create more resources for people working to eradicate poverty, drug and alcohol use, family violence, and mental health problems. They also saw a need for a safe place for teens to get services or help with whatever problems they might be facing. On the day of this interview the phone rings regularly in office at the drop-in and resource center. Halfway through the interview two young people come into the office. Kate introduces them. They’re at the Center to do their homework. They say hello and quietly close the door. “One of them is shy but she is an amazing poet!” Kate gushes after they have left.

Interview edited for clarity.

Lindley Mease: I would love to hear your story. Tell me a few milestones that brought you to where you are now.

Kate English: I’ve always known that I wanted to live a life of service. When I was sixteen I thought my life was taking me to mid-wifery. Yet I also worked for a longtime at whatever job fell into my lap and put myself through school slowly but surely as an adult. I finally really focused on finishing school. I was foster parenting two of my cousins at the time. Their parents are addicts. I had helped raise another cousin whose family member was out-of-the-picture at the time. And as a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church I had been a repeat camp counselor and worked with youth. After I finally graduated with a degree in music and a minor in history, I started substitute teaching and looking for non-profit work. I was in the right time and place and met the co-founder of One Step — she co-founded it with about eight youth. She was looking for someone to bring in and train as her successor. I had run companies in the past and worked human resources so I had a skill-set that was a good fit for the needs here. Pretty soon I found myself as executive director of the most amazing organization that I’ve ever been involved in!

Lindley: Where are you originally from?

Kate: I was born in Long Beach but grew up in Camarillo in Ventura County. I’ve been living in Santa Paula for the past twenty years. It’s a rural agricultural valley and one of the most economically depressed areas of the county. It’s also where much of our immigrant community — and undocumented community — live. Oxnard and our valley are the two areas where a lot of the county’s labor comes from for agricultural work. Agriculture is one of our largest economies in the county. Immigrant rights have always been close to my heart.

When I started volunteering at One Step we were in the middle of a campaign because there is a toxic waste site — a super-fund site — right next to Fillmore city lines. The city was considering annexing it. Chevron was trying to get the city to take it off their hands and take responsibility for this super-fund site. If the city had annexed it, Chevron was going to give us all kinds of money to develop it into a park where children weren’t allowed to be for more than six hours at a time! The clean-up plan at that time was 50 years long. One Step youth worked with an epidemiologist from UCLA and did some primary research that showed that cancer levels on that side of town were higher than state and national averages. One Step held a press conference. Then some lawsuits got started against Chevron and pretty soon there was a five year clean-up plan instead of 50. Ventura County eventually worked with Chevron and now it’s becoming a solar field. They just got the top-soil lifted [in January 2018], but there is still a benzene plume underneath that affects the town.

Our newest environmental justice campaign involves an oil company that was illegally dumping waste into the Sespe Aquifer. We found out late in the public comment period about this going on and the aquifer is less than half a mile from the town’s only drinking water source. So we are raising heck, protesting at city council meetings, having letter-writing parties, contacting congress people, and the youth are getting involved.

Lindley: Can you tell us about some of the programs of One Step?

Kate: One Step a La Vez is primarily a youth center. We have a drop-in center in Fillmore where all the programs are housed. We just started our first satellite program in Santa Paula. Some of what we do is direct service and some of it is community organizing.

We have a food pantry for the community twice a month that the youth put on. We are open from 1:00 to 7:00 every day. We have a hot meal every day. We have video games, a pool table, musical instruments, a silkscreen shop that we just started that we hope will be a business that will help the youth with job skills. And also the youth will be able to brand their campaigns by, for example, making their own shirts and things. The center also serves as a place to help youth choose college. There are first generation students whose parents don’t know how to help them with their FAFSA, for example. So we’re doing all that at the center as well.

The social justice effort is called the One Step Adelante program. We pay youth to be community organizers. We see who has an aptitude for community organizing and we have a couple of strategy retreats twice a year where we involve every youth who is here in brainstorming what needs to be better in our town. We talk about our existing campaigns. Which ones are important to you? Which one aren’t? The adults cannot be the sole campaign cheerleaders. It needs to be important to the youth, pushed by them, and then run by them in terms of having it be real community organizing experience. Every once in a while a kid will just catch on fire.

We send the youth off to camp every summer –although they cancelled it this summer which is heartbreaking. Just Communities is an organization that does the camp every summer. We send youth to camp and they develop a social justice vocabulary at this camp and they come back with a plan for their community and we help them put it into place. What’s come out of that is campaigns to get recycle barrels at the high school and to start a gay-straight alliance. Then the youth didn’t want it to be just a gay-straight alliance — they wanted it to be a social equality club that looks out for any kind of bullying or marginalization that happens at school. So they have a club that meets weekly in the style of the gay-straight alliance and a lot of the LGBTQ youth come but a lot of the MeChA students come, too, so it’s where that intersectionality happens at the high school. They teach the younger students the language of social justice that the older students have learned.

They ran the gun violence walk-out this last week and one of the students was able to go to Washington DC and talk about his work. If the youth organizers do an action once a month and they come to programming regularly, then they get a stipend of $100 a quarter for their community organizing work. It’s not much but they get excited. It’s not enough to bribe someone who doesn’t really want to work, but it’s enough to help pay for prom pictures or something.

Lindley: I am curious to hear how these youth become aware and involved. What does powerbuilding look like? That can be a very amorphous thing — especially for folks who haven’t done community organizing.

Kate: Some of the youth who helped found this organization come back as donors and as board members. We have one gentleman who was a teenager when One Step started and then he became a staff person for a while. Then he went off to UCSB and now he’s working for Future Leaders of America and he’s a board member on our program. That’s probably the most wonderful vision of wrap-arounds that we have.

When our organization started a lot of the local youth were in trouble with the law. Just getting the teens to recognize that they had a voice in their own lives and that their voice counted — it’s huge. Their success is marked in the success of their own lives — -that they stepped away from gang involvement. They recognized that the path that they were on was partly due to inherent systems of racism. They learned how to dismantle that in their own lives, while they were working on dismantling it in a societal way. Sometimes they’re dismantling it just to get to that first job or that first college class, and not to go the path that everyone has assumed that they will go.

Once some of the youth are involved in the juvenile justice system it is very difficult to avoid recidivism. I had one youth who was on his 32nd incarceration — at only 16. He’s been in and out since he was 12. His family is generationally involved in gangs. Every time he gets out and goes home there is substance abuse waiting for him in the culture of the home. He is a natural leader. He is gifted. He’s not someone who just wants or is looking for trouble. But in Ventura County there hasn’t always been an option for these youth who are involved in substance abuse — especially if methamphetamines is an issue. There was an outpatient 12 week program required by probation. Check mark — you’re done! In my opinion, addicted youth need true lifestyle shifts that take longer than a 12 week curriculum can provide.

Fillmore has a disproportionate number of youth in the juvenile justice system. Our town has 15,000 people. Fillmore has about 1–2% of the youth population in the county, but we’re up around 10–12% of youth in the juvenile justice system. So we have disparity in our area.

We work on dismantling bias over here, work on addressing needs of the youth over there, and somewhere in the middle we have conversations with the youth so that they can understand how these issues play a role in their lives and how they can work to change the systems that affect them. I try to build relationships with law enforcement. The local police chief has been amazing to work with but he is retiring. We are hopeful to continue to build these bridges.

The most magic happens when we have youth from different walks coming together, and sharing the similarities that they are seeing in their communities. After the Social Equality Club started, Project Pride started which is an LGBT support group that meets here every Wednesday night. We started to have a lot more youth who really wanted to do community organizing coming out of that group. And they bring other youth with them. We have — I swear to you — homies hanging out with the youth outside the gender binary and there is no drama. They’ve stopped using the word “gay” to mean “dumb” around here. It’s really cool. There is culture shift happening. That’s the magic.

Lindley: So, it’s not just working with a youth. It’s working with their family and community, and environment. You are developing community organizing to enable long-term change so there is not a repeat cycle. So many NGOs are focused only on near-term outcomes.

Kate: Foundations want to hear about outcomes. “What are the outcomes? What are the outcomes?” I can tell you what the outcomes are going to be in 5 years…does that work?

Lindley: How about 30?! How you do vision the 30-year or 50-year time horizon in terms of your work and what community organizing means for the youth in Fillmore? What does that future look like?

Kate: I tell this to a lot of older social justice-heads who are so depressed right now with the world and Trump. I tell them come hang out with the One Step youth for five minutes. They’re gonna dismantle patriarchy. They are doing it with their language! They are shifting culture all the time just by the language that they use.

We are in this massive civil rights movement now. For trans people, for black people, for every one. We’ve unearthed the quietness around the “–isms” and we are not going to look at them anymore and say we can’t look at them. Sexual assault is going to be looked at. These youth are ready to talk about all these issues every day. They are so much more connected because they’re digital. You know technology has its shadow side and they are going to have wrestle with that. But the benefits that they are getting being so much smarter at such a younger age and having access so much information.

We are headed to more equity not less. There is no way we can’t be. My personal thought on this is that democracy is wrapped up in this idea of independence. But we actually need a declaration of interdependence to move us. Once we learn how to temper the corporations, democracy can keep going if capitalism is tempered by the idea of interdependence and community — — both with our environment and each other. I think these youth get that. And they might not have the language for that yet but they are going to get there.

Lindley: It’s amazing how much energy youth give us, give you. What would the world look like if more people were exposed to that vision and hope on a day to day level? Do you think of your work as movement building, and if so what movement are you a part of?

Kate: Yes, this is a social justice movement that we are involved in — on many levels. Everyone’s personal liberation is bound up in everyone else’s. My mother quoted John Donne’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” She quoted that so much to me as a child: “Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. … Each man’s death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind.”

We are working with LGBTQ rights. We’re working with immigrants’ rights. We’re working in all these different sort of families within the movement. One Step tends to be very locally involved. What are policies we can change right here? What are the things we can do right here? We can think globally a lot, too. When we need a big picture perspective, we can go to marches. But what does a march mean when we come back home? What are we going to actually work on? Because if we’re not actually doing work on a regular basis, these are just feel-good moments. The marches are the gasoline for the actual work. I keep reminding youth, you know, we went to the women’s march in LA. And they were like, “This amaaazing!” And I was like, “Alright but if you don’t work with me these next few years, if we don’t keep working on this it’s just gonna be like ‘remember that time we went to the march?” You are actually the only person who can make it epic. You are the only person that can take this moment that we just all went through and turn it into something that will change the future.

Lindley: I so appreciate that. I think that the hype that surrounds marches and subsequent disengagement because no change actually occurred as new demands were made is really a challenge to movement building. How do folks ally with your movement? How do you invite folks? What type of solidarity do you look for?

Kate: Fillmore is a part of a valley. There is Santa Paula which is about 30,000 person town. Fillmore, which is 15,000. And then Piru which is about 5,000 or 7,000 people. And the whole valley is avocados and lemons and oranges in terms of what is produced here. Our center primarily serves Fillmore and Piru, but we also have about 10% of our youth coming from Santa Paula. Especially our LGBTQ programming and our programming with youth who are on probation. When I first volunteered with One Step we kind of had a contentious relationship with law enforcement. They thought of us as a hug-a-thug organization like “that’s where bad kids go.”

I do feel like the decision makers in this town do not always see that this is a town of approximately 80% Latino & Chicano people.

We encourage the youth to take their issues to the city council, too. There is one major ally on the city council who’s also the one Latino city council member and then there’s four white city council members.

We have had pushback on our LGBTQ programming too. I was warned we might lose donors… but we haven’t. There are some religious things we’re dealing with. There are some cultural things. I’ve had one parent tell me they don’t want their youth coming here when we are having the Aztec dance class because the demons are here then. That’s an extreme version. There are some Catholic cultural things that resist some of our programming. Like we had yoga classes here at one time and that was not okay with the community. I have to learn to push when appropriate and respect and accept other things.

Dismantling the image that most of the white folks have in our town about our program has been rough. I still feel like I am deep in that climb of making us visible and understandable to that smaller but powerful part of our community. The next town over, Santa Paula, is better about this. They have the only farmworker monument in the country. They have murals that highlight Latino community. Santa Paula has a Latino town-hall that’s very involved in government and civic affairs. The town-hall is where some of the Spanish-speaking population can conduit their concerns to the city, because they kind of trust the Latino town-hall and they come to that on a regular basis. They support and they do scholarships. I had them come out here and talk to Fillmore and say, “Let’s start something like that here in Fillmore.” When I invited them out and I invited every Latino leader, teacher, person that I could think of, only two people came to that exploratory meeting.

Our major allies have been Just Communities, MICOP http://mixteco.org/, Future Leaders of America, and CAUSE https://causenow.org/ The former chief of police was also a great ally. He understood the need for our organization. Probation leadership has also come along and they are really seeing the value in community based organizations, but we are still working on winning over some of youththe field probation officers.

Lindley: I think that your stories and so many other community organizing stories demonstrate that that organizers have to be constantly surveying, and aware, and and fighting. It’s a long messy often very uncertain slog. I’m curious what brings you hope. And how do you instill that in your youth?

Kate: The youth have contagious amounts of energy, so it is always nice being around them. You get it through osmosis by just being with them for a short amount of time. But also there’s no other option. (laughs) If I was tired I would just have to put on my shoes and keep slogging because there is no other option. We can’t just let them poison the water. It’s our literal lives that we are fighting for — the youth especially I think they get that. There are days when I‘ve got tons of energy and there are days when I rather just take a nap but you know you just keep on slogging because there is no other choice.

I think that these questions that you are asking about vision and long-term vision are really important. When you do re-visit the vision of what you want and how the world could actually be, that helps to create some of that long-term juice. I don’t always remind myself about what this will look like in thirty years or what this will look like in ten years because so much of my work is focused on what we are doing today, right now, this is the fight we’re doing. We know the kinds of goals that we want and we know the big pie-in-the-sky goal but sometimes it’s just nice to ask: What is this going to look like? What are some things right now that we’ve already changed or culture-shifted in the past three or four or five years? I think that One Step has a reputation in town as a change agent. For a longtime that wasn’t necessarily seen as a good thing by a lot of people in town, but now it’s starting to be a little bit more palatable…maybe. Someone just recently told me that 60% of the registered voters here are registered “Democrat” which I found very interesting considering the town elects fairly conservative local leaders. We just gotta get ’em to the polls. (laughs)