When Tamara South heard about the South Bronx Rising Together Parent Council, she applied right away. She was raised in the Bronx and returned after she finished college and as she began her career in education. This was her home, where she and her husband were raising their two children, and she wanted to play a part in shaping its future.
That was the goal of the Parent Council, an initiative of Children’s Aid’s Collective Impact team: To create a space where members of the community could help shape our advocacy work.
“We’ve also done civic engagement with our youth,” said Mariel Charles, who facilitates the Parent Council on behalf of SBRT. “With the Parent Council, we wanted to take that same work to people who were ready to be leaders in their community. We wanted to build something that was supportive, accessible, and representative.”
The planning for the Parent Council began in late 2020, during the first year of the pandemic. By March, the SBRT team had received 39 applications for what would be 12 spots on the first Council. In April, they had their kickoff Zoom meeting, and they’ve been meeting at least once a month since then.
During the first year, the group created broad categories of advocacy issues that interested them, from access to healthy foods to improving behavioral health conditions in early childhood education. They received a series of trainings from Sunflower Strategists, a training group for grassroots advocacy efforts.
“I’ve been working to promote healthy foods,” Tamara said. “My kids love to eat tofu and vegetables, but only because they were exposed to them at a young age. Not all families can afford – or even find – healthy, fresh food options in our community.”
For Reina Calleja, a mother of three, the Parent Council has been an opportunity to feel empowered. When she first moved to the Bronx from Mexico 32 years ago, she felt as though she didn’t have a voice.
When she noticed that her older child was having trouble staying focused, she brought it to the attention of teachers and doctors – who labeled her son a troublemaker rather than evaluating him for learning differences.
“Parents sometimes have problems but don’t speak,” Reina said. “They don’t know about a lot of resources, and they don’t even know about their rights. We try to provide parents with information. We try to encourage them to have a voice.”
Parents on the Council are compensated for every meeting they attend. Recently, the Council held votes for leadership positions, to begin this month. Although the parents would be happy to volunteer their time, the payment is a powerful reminder that their contributions have incredible value.
In addition to the work, the group manages to find plenty of time for fun.
“We had a nutritionist come in to help us with healthy recipes for Thanksgiving,” said Mariel “We had a virtual potluck. We’ve had a game night. We have a social committee. We have a wellness committee. We have a professional development committee. There is a lot going on – a lot of energy.”
So much energy, in fact, that the Council will soon be expanding. In an effort to make it even more representative of the community, the council will soon add male-identifying members (right now the group all identify as women) and hope to bring on a French interpreter to better support French-speaking parents from West Africa and the Caribbean.
But no matter the language, the goal of the group remains: lifting the voices and the needs of people in the South Bronx.
“Some people associate the Bronx with crime or with poverty,” said Tamara. “But the real problems we face are all the result of a lack of investment. Our kids want to learn violin or ballet as much as kids in Manhattan do, but we don’t have the same opportunities. We’re trying to change that.”
