Bread and butter

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Four years ago, Irma Zamora was faced with a hit-and-run on her parked car in her neighborhood. Having just emigrated to the U.S. from Mexico, she was unsure of her rights. Zamora turned to Juntos, 2029 S. Eighth St., where she was advised how to handle the situation with her insurance company.

Now, she’s one of the nonprofit’s most active volunteers, working to support social justice in South Philly’s Latino immigrant community and back in Mexico, where most have relocated from.

"In South Philly there’s really a lack of leadership in the [Latino immigrant] community," she said through translator Peter Bloom, Juntos’ executive director.

"She thinks it’s necessary to act as a leader because there’s a lot of issues facing the community," Bloom added.

Zamora takes advantage of nearly every service Juntos offers, including English classes and leadership development training and workshops about legal services, preventative medicine and workers’ rights.

Bloom said an average of 50 people from this specific community — the majority living in the immediate area of Juntos’ office in the Houston Community Center — utilize these services every month. Founded by Bloom and Adam Ureneck, initially as a volunteer ESL program at St. Thomas Aquinas Church, 17th and Morris streets, in 2002, the nonprofit has helped thousands and community members aren’t the only ones noticing.

In June, Juntos was one of 57 community-based Delaware Valley organizations to receive the Bread & Roses Community Fund Grant.

"We felt their organization has made tremendous progress and change in the community they serve in South Philadelphia," Arun Prabhakaran, Bread & Roses board member and a member of its grant-making committee, said. "The quality of life has been positively impacted, they’ve educated members in the Mexican immigrant community on how to use their rights when confronted with the issue of immigration, especially in the workplace."

A total of $212,000 was dispersed among the organizations. For Juntos, receiving a part of that will help it continue to strengthen its services.

"We’re excited to do our work, we think it’s important," Bloom said. "It’s nice to be helped and recognized for it."

Bloom said this year, the main directive of Juntos, its three full-time employees, full-time intern and six volunteers, is training those who seek their services on workforce rights and how those in the community can focus on protecting themselves from immigration raids at work.

"The government has an agency called Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that enforces immigration law. Sometimes they’ll send an agent to a workplace that has undocumented immigrants and the affect of that can be pretty negative in the community — it can tear families apart, sometimes members are deported. The idea here is to prepare families," he said, such as how to handle finances if the breadwinner is deported or protecting themselves if ICE comes to their home without a search warrant and they feel harassed.

Additionally, Juntos will use some of the Bread & Roses funding to lobby for hiring more bilingual counseling assistants in the School District of Philadelphia to help students’ parents who don’t speak English. The District has language hot lines to aid non-English speaking parents, but Bloom said not many members of the community use them.

"Immigrants want someone to talk to, just like anyone else. The hotlines can help with informational questions, but if they are worried their child isn’t doing well and they want to talk with a teacher, it’s not going to happen with the hotline," he said.

"The school district employs 50 to 60 bilingual counseling assistants. That number has been cut within the last three to four years. We want some of them restored and some of them in South Philadelphia," Bloom continued "We’re trying to organize supporters and the community to hold the school district accountable to try to reinvest in this particular issue."

Bloom said the several dozen assistants — some who speak Spanish, others Cambodian or other languages — are at different schools each week, but there is a need for more fluent in Spanish.

"South Philly has had an increase in Spanish-speaking people in the last five to 10 years that’s been quite incredible," he said citing the organization’s research that showed a 200 to 300 percent jump in that time. "Yet there isn’t one steady person to help navigate [parents] through [the district’s] system. Almost all of the parents we help are enrolled in English classes and are trying to learn the language as fast as possible."

But Juntos isn’t solely about the Latino immigrant population in South Philly — they’ve placed an importance on the communities left behind.

"We recognize a lot of people come from some of the same places in Mexico. In many small rural towns there, half the residents will [move to] Philadelphia. We try to speak to people in this community about why they left [Mexico]. The opportunities [here] are definitely attractive to people, and the places where they’re from are struggling," Bloom said. "But people should have the right to stay in places they were born. We work with people here to make the places where they’re from better."

Recent projects included helping a community in San Mateo Ozolco, Mexico, build its first high school so youths could further their education while staying in their native country. Currently, Juntos is working with farmers in some of the towns to market their food and products in the U.S.

Through other funding, Juntos was able to hire someone to coordinate all Mexico efforts. There also have been several people who have gone back to Mexico to live while working on some of these projects.

Most of the local efforts are based in South Philly, although Bloom said Juntos is branching out and offering services to a similar population in the Northeast. Those helped are not restricted to Latino descent, although the majority is and Juntos specializes in this population. Bloom said if someone who is U.S. born but of Latino ancestry seeks its services, they will not be turned away.

Each year, Bread & Roses gathers 20 or so activists engaged in social work throughout the city to form the grant-making committee. Organizations that apply for funds are reviewed and interviewed by Bread & Roses, which routinely has activists raising and distributing funds.

"Bread & Roses promotes and supports change, not charity. We find organizations that create long-lasting changes, help develop leadership and are focused on collective action," Prabhakaran said. "We fund organizations like Juntos that help people organize themselves collectively and bring about social change."