By Stephanie DeLuna, Senior, College of Communication
The Project, The University of Texas at Austin’s largest day of service, will take place in the Dove Springs community on February 25. The Project will also return to Dove Springs in 2013, and will unite the community, students, faculty, staff and alumni while revamping the Southeast Austin neighborhood.
Hidden in Southeast Austin is Dove Springs, an underserved neighborhood of more than 36,000 primarily Latino residents. The community is home to high obesity rates, lack of healthy food alternatives, high educational achievement gaps and gang activity. Still, residents are reaching out to other communities in order to create positive change in the area and expand the horizons for future generations of Dove Springs residents.
Community leader Ofelia Zapata knows firsthand what Dove Springs needs in order to improve its current education, safety, health and political issues. Zapata, a native of East Austin, has been working with Austin Interfaith for 23 years. Austin Interfaith is a coalition of churches, schools and unions that come from all over the city to identify current pressures on families and communities in order to provide citizens with the knowledge and power to become leaders and improve their own neighborhoods.
“The symbol of Dove Springs is a dove, which means peace and love,” Zapata said. “That’s the kind of neighborhood that I want to create, and I know that there are other people here that feel the same way.”
Before Zapata became a strong, outspoken Dove Springs community leader, she was just like any other resident. A timid, widowed mother at the time, she began attending PTA meetings at Sanchez Elementary where her children attended school. Zapata, who is visually impaired, said she was intimidated and didn’t want to attend the meetings at first.
“I had a bad experience when I was in school. I was always running into people, having accidents and people were always making fun of me,” she said. “But my children wanted me to go, so I went.” With her children’s education in mind, Zapata never missed a meeting and eventually became the PTA president at the school.
Zapata was introduced to Austin Interfaith through her church shortly after and began learning about educational issues that were affecting nearby schools, including Sanchez Elementary. Crucial funding for 16 schools that provided assistant principals, counselors, parent support specialists and full-time Pre-K was going to be cut.
“When I heard that, I got scared because I wanted my kids to learn and get everything out of school that I didn’t,” Zapata said.
Austin Interfaith then asked Zapata to teach what she had learned to parents in her community. Zapata went on to organize a community meeting that brought in 100 parents along with district members to discuss school funding.
“At the end of the meeting there were many parents that were furious because they were unaware of these issues affecting their schools,” she said. Seeing the need for awareness, Zapata met with every principal and PTA organization to figure out a strategy to improve learning at their schools.
“Even though most of us don’t have money or the degrees, we have power when we come together to work on a common issue,” Zapata said. Ultimately, the community won the fight to keep the money for their schools.
“That was the first time I didn’t feel alone,” Zapata said. “Knowing that I felt what other parents felt gave me the courage to want to do more and learn more.”
Zapata continued to work with Austin Interfaith to improve neighborhood schools by helping create an elementary through high school afterschool enrichment program called Prime Time in the early 1990’s. The program was an extension of the learning day and incorporated learning and social skills with fun activities such as cooking classes, guitar lessons anime art sessions and etiquette courses. Zapata said that this program also worked as a gang prevention strategy by keeping Dove Springs and other neighborhood students involved while most of their parents worked late.
“When I became a widow, I was a single mom and couldn’t afford for my children to go to fee-based afterschool programs,” she said. “My kids would always go to the library after school because it was free and safe.”
According to a study on Dove Springs by the Wesley Center for Family and Neighborhood Development, 71 percent of youth in Dove Springs do not belong to a group, organization or club at school or in the community. Furthermore, only 49 percent of residents in Dove Springs have access to the internet. With little resources available, many Dove Springs youth turn to gang activities. According to the study, Dove Springs youth said that the top three problems that the neighborhood faces are alcohol/drug abuse, gangs/juvenile delinquency and crime/violence.
“A lot of our kids don’t get to be kids,” Zapata said. She explained that many Southeast Austin students are responsible for cooking, cleaning and taking care of siblings everyday afterschool while their parents are at work.
“There was a little boy who was getting referred to administration because he was falling asleep in class,” she said. “We had a conversation with the boy and found out his father was a paraplegic. The son had to feed, bathe and attend to his father all night long, so the boy wasn’t getting sleep. A lot of our kids have to be grown up.”
Zapata said that the need for mentors and role models in Dove Springs is still a top priority, and that bringing Project to the community in 2012 and 2013 is a great step to show the neighborhood that surrounding areas do care about Dove Springs. She said that she would like for Project to encourage Dove Springs residents to help improve communication, neighborhood safety, voting rates and health in the community.
“Service is about helping people, so they can help others,” Zapata said. “It’s about making leaders.”
For more information on Project and Dove Springs, visit www.utproject.org
