Making Connections-San Antonio — changing community from within

Carol Baass Sowa
Today’s Catholic

Dr. John Soto of the Alamo Community College District, MC-SA consultant Rosie Castro and MC-SA Director Victor Azios celebrate the opening of the Westside Education and Training Center (WETC).
Photo provided

     SAN ANTONIO • When Victor Azios, director of Making Connections-San Antonio (MC-SA), was considering taking on this Baltimore-based job for the Annie E. Casey Foundation, his wife asked why he wanted to do this. His answer was to the point.
    “I’ve worked in many parts of social work,” he replied. “Worked with youth all my life, worked with families, mental health, foster care. But it’s always a piece. This,” he said, “is an opportunity to try to bring the whole together and make something lasting — sustainable, lasting change.”
    Azios’ first taste of social work was involvement with a juvenile detention home while obtaining a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Houston.
    After obtaining a master’s degree in social work from Boston College, his work took him to Galveston, El Paso, Tucson and to a different Casey Foundation involved in foster care and based in Seattle, which eventually brought him to San Antonio.

    While with this program, he was asked to be part of brain-storming sessions for a new initiative of the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore — Making Connections.

    The ideas behind Making Connections were derived from looking at various community change initiatives that had occurred from 1960 to 1990. Most of these, Azios noted, had been difficult. Following this, a series of national consultative sessions were set up to glean thoughts on how best to approach community change.

    Making Connections was launched in 1990 as part of a larger effort called Neighborhood Transformation Family Development. Initially looking at 60 cities across the country, the list of target cities for the new initiative was finally narrowed to 22 — including San Antonio. The object was to find cities with defined needs that already had something in place upon which to build.

    “Making Connections itself is really about strengthening families and changing community from within,” he said. “One of the things we learned from all of our consultative sessions was that those initiatives that had come in with a blueprint had encountered serious difficulties.” As a result, it was agreed the new program would need to build on existing efforts, be careful to “do no harm,” make “new” mistakes, rather than repeat past failures, and lead with ideas instead of dollars.

    Azios, who took on the job of heading the San Antonio program in 1999, was not given a game plan as such, other than being charged to build a movement around strengthening families, neighborhoods and communities. His first year was primarily spent talking to people in San Antonio — and listening to what they had to say. It was left to him to frame a definition for the movement he was to build, and he drew from several leaders for whom he had great respect — Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Emiliano Zapata.

    He also set about trying to determine what it was that people wanted and needed. “But, more important than what they wanted and needed,” he noted, “what they were willing to work for — together.” This was always approached in partnership with others and began to take shape after about a year and a half.

    Also to be determined was the area with which MC-SA would work. This was eventually narrowed down to the West Side, consisting of two related areas: the near West side (a downtown area from I-10 and I-35 to General McMullen Drive) and the near mid-West side (from General McMullen up to Acme Street). This very large geographic area encompassed 134,000 people and 44,000 households and included two school districts and four city council districts, making it the largest Making Connections area of the 22 throughout the United States. It was also an area which felt disenfranchised.

    This area was further broken down by Azios and his team of consulting partners into five sectors, with an organization being identified in each sector to work with directly. Then a team of trained facilitators was brought in and summits of over 800 persons were called in each sector.     From this emerged a list of 11 focus areas for which people were willing to work, with these being further distilled into more specific key areas.

    One of these concerned work. “And when you talk about work,” said Azios, “it’s about education. It’s about a skill level so that you are competitive as an individual for a living wage job.” This means a job that brings dignity and benefits, as well as a living wage.

Another area was summed up as fiscal and human assets. The fiscal component involves building assets — a home, vehicle, education, small business and the like — and utilizing asset accumulation and protection for the betterment of the family. The human component addresses children in the context of family and community.

    The importance was seen of forming healthy children, prepared to succeed in school, through a lens of resident leadership. “What you’re really looking at,” said Azios, “is the formation — to use a very proven Catholic term — of a human being in the context of interdependence with family and community, institutions, faith and so on.”

    He notes research has shown stability to be a key to success in school, with such factors as multiple moves and financial and other stressors distracting students from achieving their full potential, despite having high intelligence or aptitude. “So if you can bring stability to the home,” he said, “then the child’s aptitudes and capacities are going to be fully brought to their potential.”

    Making Connections invests in leadership development by helping people acquire the skills they need to interface with institutions, advocate for their family and their values and participate actively in a civic society.

    Working slowly, as a catalyst, MC-SA gradually began this weaving together of the various focus areas and Azios points proudly to two visible examples that arose from this: The West Side Education and Training Center and Neighborhood Place, where numerous services are found in one convenient location.

    “It’s going to take more than 10 years to have the impact,” he relates, “for the needle to move in the West Side, where you have over 50 percent drop-out rates.” A factor, he notes, is the new immigrant population often brings with it a less than sixth grade education, as mandatory education in most Latin American countries stops at sixth grade.

    “So you have an undereducated group,” he said. “Not a group that has any lack of intelligence or capacity or will.” These centers are a source to make such persons fully participatory members in a civic society, helping them learn English as a second language, acquire a GED or high school diploma or other skills that will open better job opportunities to them. “If they get that job,” he added, “it can bring stability to their life. It can bring new and different opportunities to their children and their families.” This is the kind of community change Making Connections seeks to bring about.

    Partners in the form of organizations, institutions and individuals have been and continue to be key to this — so many that if Azios had named then all when recently accepting the Benitia Humanitarian Award on behalf of MC-SA, he would have run out of his allotted 20 minutes speaking time. As he puts it, “If somebody didn’t slam their door in my face and they wanted to work with us, we worked with them.”

    A few of their community partners include the Archdiocese of San Antonio, the Edgewood and San Antonio Independent School Districts, ACCIÓN Texas and Our Lady of the Lake University. Among their anchor partners are Family Services Association, Voices for Children and the City of San Antonio Department of Community Initiatives, while on the list of neighborhood partners are the Benitia Family Center, Guadalupe Community Center, American Indians of Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions, American Sunrise, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower and more.

    Participating as “friends” have been the Alamo Area Community College District, AVANCE, Women’s Global Connection and the St. Mary’s University Learning and Development Center. And all of these are only a fraction of Making Connections’ many partners in implementing positive change for West side residents.

    MC-SA is in the final phase of its work, with Azios poised to pass the management torch on to four major partners by the end of March, with details in the process of being confirmed. The four expected to take over this responsibility are Catholic Charities, the City of San Antonio, Edgewood Independent School District and Family Services. They will continue what MC-SA started, serving as a model of achieving community goals through collaboration.

    “It’s not people talking together,” Azios says. “It’s people working together. And from that work will come new generations of leaders who will integrate that collaborative methodology into how they do things.”
    “So I expect,” he adds, “that our city council people of tomorrow, our mayor, our district attorneys, our judges, our priests, will come from here. And they will have a mind-set — it will be part of their DNA — that the only way to do things is to work together!”