That’s the message from backers of “Homie UP: Youth Empowerment Program,” a new, four-year, $1.7 million, grant-funded initiative through the Cal State San Marcos-based National Latino Research Center, which will provide at-risk high school students the mentoring and educational support that can keep them on track toward earning a college degree. The effort gets underway this fall with an incoming cohort of 50 freshmen who are in danger of being expelled from school.

“A lot of these kids come from families with a lack of formal education, a lack of knowledge about how to go about getting into college, a lack of role models, and a lack of resources,” said Dr. Arcela Nuñez­-Alvárez, the National Latino Research Center’s research director and Homie Up program manager. “Our goal is to provide them the tools they need to succeed.”

The National Latino Research Center works with stakeholders from local government and nonprofits to improve education, civic involvement, cultural competency, community development and more. Agencies the National Latino Research Center is partnering with on Homie Up: Youth Empowerment include the Vista and San Marcos Unified school districts, the Mano a Mano Foundation, The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, the University Police Department, and Survivors of Torture, International. The Mano a Mano Foundation will provide access to youth counseling and facilitate workshops and presentations on improving communication. Law enforcement will focus on building trust and community-oriented policing that integrates culturally based, problem-solving approaches. Survivors of Torture, International, will reach out to youth and parents who have been victims of trauma resulting from violence. And the Vista and San Marcos school districts will target students to take part in the program.

Restorative justice practices, which are becoming more mainstream as schools look for more creative ways to engage students in correct behavior, will be used in place of automatic expulsions or suspensions when dealing with some offenses.

“The focus will be on students who are at risk and who oftentimes don’t see college as an opportunity,” said Cipriano Vargas, who sits on the Vista Unified School District’s Board of Trustees and who is a CSUSM graduate. “Too many are living in impoverished communities or are being exposed to a gang lifestyle, and it’s crucial that we help open their eyes so they can see the possibilities that are out there.”

Although both are operated through the National Latino Research Center, Homie UP: Youth Empowerment Program, is not related to the similarly named Homie UP, which offers American history from a Chicano/Latino perspective free of charge to incarcerated individuals.

“This is a project that will help increase the number of Latino youth who are in the academic pipeline, a pipeline that will lead them to college and a rewarding career,” said Dr. Xuan Santos, an assistant professor of sociology at CSUSM who is working with Nuñez­-Alvárez.

Most Homie UP: Youth Empowerment Program activities will take place daily after school at Centro Universidad Popular, which sits a few blocks from Vista High School, and at Twin Oaks High School in San Marcos. Students taking part in the program will be tracked over their four years in high school to measure Homie Up’s impact on their academic progress, developing career goals, and changes in risk behavior.

“We are really looking forward to bringing this added support for our youth,” said Nuñez­-Alvárez. “We’re finding that a lot of Latinos are still lacking in college preparation and as a result are ending up in alternative schools or continuation schools or the juvenile justice system.”

Added Vargas: “This program is but another example of Cal State San Marcos’ focus on strong community partnerships.”

Homie UP, short for Homie Universidad Popular, is a program that offers American history from a Chicano/Latino perspective free of charge to incarcerated individuals. The initiative started after community members participating in a similar curriculum known as Universidad Popular, or People’s University, expressed interest in presenting the information they were learning to their incarcerated loved ones.

“The program was initially intended for those serving a life sentence, but then we received so many requests, we felt compelled to make it accessible to all incarcerated individuals regardless of sentence length,” said Flor Alvarez, a Homie UP coordinator and National Latino Research Center (NLRC) Research Assistant.

As the popularity of the program increases, the program coordinators are beginning to feel some growing pains as their staff and funding remains the same.

“We have spent countless hours creating the Homie UP curriculum and reviewing assignments— sometimes we work overnight or even on the weekends,” said Alvarez. “It’s all on a volunteer basis, so many times we pay out of pocket to send assignments. When we are fortunate, some family members will contribute stamps, paper and envelopes.”

When the program was at its infancy, all the students were of Latino decent. Now, Homie UP’s student base is very diverse and includes both male and female inmates of all ethnicities convicted of a variety of offenses. The team’s future plan is to offer an increased variety of classes, and not just from a Latino perspective.

“This project has really catapulted us into this national discussion that’s going on around incarceration,” said NLRC Research Director Arcela Nuñez-Alvárez. “Our project is very much aligned to issues that happening nationally and at the state level and locally.”

A $10,000 grant from California Humanities has allowed the team to tell the story further through a documentary titled, Homie UP: Stories of Love and Redemption. The grant supports documentary films, radio and new media productions that enhance the community’s understanding of California and its cultures, peoples and histories.

The team had a one-year turnaround time to create the film and worked with filmmaker Jennifer Myhre, as well as an advisory group consisting of CSUSM professors David Avalos, Bonnie Bade, Marisol Clark-Ibáñez and Charles “Chuck” Allen.

The hour-long documentary recently received accolades and was presented with a Silver Award by the Spotlight Documentary Film Awards in December 2015.

So far the award-winning film has hosted 10 screenings throughout California from San Diego to San Francisco. The documentary features real students who have been released from prison, and family members. Screenings are usually accompanied with an art exhibit displaying the work of Homie UP students, as well as a panel discussion about how the prison system affects the entire community.

According to Nuñez-Alvárez, there is still a lot of discussion to be had concerning families, inmates and the so-called school-to-prison pipeline, a systematic process by which students, primarily African Americans and Latinos, are pushed out of the mainstream educational system and channeled into the criminal system.

“This happens through harsh and discriminatory school discipline policies,” said Nuñez-Alvárez. “Research shows that students of color receive harsher punishments. Incidents at school tend to be the first encounter with law enforcement and thus begin the pathway to jail or prison.”

The documentary is now being used as an educational tool for the community. An expansion of the documentary, which looks at why certain populations are over represented in prisons and in jail, is already in the planning stages.

“There is finally a shift of dialogue,” said Lilian Serrano, CSUSM alumnus and NLRC research coordinator. “Everyone can talk about the numbers, but the film gives faces to mass incarceration. For every person that is in prison, there is a mother, a father, a sibling or even children. I think that is a contribution to the discussion that no one else is making and that’s what makes this project unique.”

To learn more about Homie UP or to view an upcoming screening of Homie UP: Stories of Love and Redemption contact NLRC at 760-750-3500.

The study, Cultivando Liderazgo (Nurturing Leadership), is being undertaken through a partnership involving CSUSM and the National Latino Research Center (NLRC), the latter of which is based at the San Marcos campus. The Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency that administers AmeriCorps and other national service programs, is funding the three-year study.

“Our ultimate goal is to get a better idea to see what tools are most useful in getting people involved, finding out what challenges people are facing in trying to get involved, and what we can do to keep them involved,” said NLRC Research Director Arcela Nuñez­-Alvárez.

The project comes during a time of sustained growth in the local Latino population. Over the past decade, the number of Latinos calling San Diego County home has increased from a little more than one in four residents to a little less than one in three. In some cities and neighborhoods, Latinos account for well more than half of the population, yet locally collected data indicate they generally are disengaged from civic life, and they have the lowest voter turnout of any group.

The study evolved from an earlier effort known as Universidad Popular, or People’s University, in which students and professors visited local libraries and community centers for seminars with grandparents, parents, and their children on various topics with titles such as The Latino Experience and the Importance of Education and Chicano History and Culture.

“We just felt there was a need for more educational opportunities in the community, especially among the Latino immigrant communities,” Nuñez­-Alvárez said.

Before long, 70 or more people were turning out for the weekly seminars. When Universidad Popular last year tackled the subject of Latino civic engagement, interest spiked even further.

“It became very clear to us that this was an area where people were unaware of the process,” Nuñez­-Alvárez said. “And even if they were aware of the process, they weren’t involved politically or involved in civic affairs.”

That’s when Nuñez­-Alvárez and Marisol Clark­-Ibáñez, a CSUSM associate professor of sociology, began thinking about expanding their effort to include a study measuring the impact the civic engagement courses were having.

“Community participation in civic leadership for Latinos is especially relevant in San Diego County given that civic engagement among Latinos lags far behind their white, Asian and African-American counterparts both in California and nationally,” said Nuñez­-Alvárez. “Although individual experiences that motivate civic engagement are well­ documented, research on factors such as age, educational background, socio­economic status, familial upbringing, cultural context and geographic locale, which are also related to civic engagement, have not been studied empirically.”

The study comes as campaigning begins to heat up for the 2016 presidential election—an election in which Latinos are expected to play a pivotal role regardless of their turnout. Under current plans, the Universidad Popular model will be expanded to neighborhoods from coastal to inland North County.

“This will allow us to duplicate the curriculum we’ve been using and take it to many different communities and see if it is having any kind of impact on civic involvement,” Nuñez­-Alvárez said.

Milestones for the first year include finalizing the research design and implementation plan with advisory groups, starting to enroll people taking part in the study, and collecting data. Milestones for the second year include training data collectors and continuing with enrollment. Milestones for the third year include final data analysis and dissemination, holding a summit on Latino civic engagement, and presenting findings to community members. Grant amounts are for $284,067 annually.

A long list of collaborating campus departments, offices and student organizations are involved in the project, including the Departments of Anthropology, Sociology, Modern Language Studies, Human Development (Spanish), the Latin@ Center, the Latino Association of Faculty and Staff, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) and S.T.A.N.D. Other regional organizations involved include the San Diego County Library, the American Civil Liberties Union, the San Diego Registrar of Voters, Alliance San Diego, Alianza Comunitaria, Vista Community Clinic Poder Popular, Latinos y Latinas en Accion, the North County Immigration Taskforce and the Farmworker CARE Coalition.

Both Clark­-Ibáñez and Nuñez-­Alvárez have extensive experience in promoting education and civic literacy. The research team at the NLRC has more than 15 years of experience conducting nationally­recognized research in education, civic engagement, youth empowerment and justice, health education, and disaster­ preparedness among migrant and Latino families in the region. NLRC’s on­going, close collaborative work among hard-­to-­reach communities in the region has earned it noteworthy credibility among the Spanish­-speaking migrant and Latino communities of Southern California. For the Cultivando Liderazgo project, collaborating organizations include the San Diego County Public Library and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Lead researchers, Marisol Clark-Ibáñez, CSUSM associate professor of sociology, and Arcela Nuñez-Alvárez, research director at NLRC, are building on the Universidad Popular: Cultivando Liderazgo (People’s University: Nurturing Leadership) program, an initiative designed to demonstrate feasible and effective methods for promoting lifelong civic engagement among Latino participants, particularly low-income adults with low formal education levels.

“Community participation in civic leadership for Latinos is especially relevant in San Diego County given that civic engagement among Latinos lags far behind their White, Asian and African American counterparts both in California and nationally,” said Nuñez-Alvárez. “Although individual experiences that motivate civic engagement are well-documented, research on factors such as age, educational background, socio-economic status, familial upbringing, cultural context and geographic locale, which are also related to civic engagement, have not been studied empirically.”

Both Clark-Ibáñez and Nuñez-Alvárez have extensive and demonstrated experience in promoting education and civic literacy. The research team at NLRC has over 15 years of experience conducting nationally-recognized research in education, civic engagement, youth empowerment and justice, health education, and disaster-preparedness among migrant and Latino families in the region. NLRC’s on-going, close collaborative work among hard-to-reach communities in the region has earned it noteworthy credibility among the Spanish-speaking migrant and Latino communities of Southern California. For the Cultivando Liderazgo project, collaborating organizations include the San Diego County Public Library and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Comprehensive approaches to understanding the civic engagement of Latinos are needed so that we can recognize the strengths of this population in order to build upon them and understand what factors will lead to their increased civic engagement,” noted Nuñez-Alvárez. “Clearly Cultivando Liderazgo can help us to understand the dynamics behind the civic engagement of this important and growing community of the region.”

About the National Latino Research Center

The National Latino Research Center (NLRC) is committed to contributing to the knowledge and understanding of rapidly growing U.S. Latino populations through applied research, training, technical assistance, research-based services, and information exchange. The NLRC envisions a diverse, just and equitable society that provides a healthy environment through universal quality healthcare, education, technology and political representation. Specializing in applied research, the NLRC brings together key stakeholders from the community, government, NGO sector, and private industry to identify solutions and develop strategies to address local and regional challenges. The NLRC conducts research and training in the areas of education, civic engagement, cultural competency, health, environmental issues, public policy, and community development. In addition to research projects, the NLRC provides technical assistance to a range of organizations and actively supports multi-agency collaborations that seek to leverage resources and expertise.

The event will bring together a wide range of resources and support for families and children who live and work in this remote region of the County. In addition, Drs. Sara Bufferd and Kimberly D’Anna-Hernandez from the CSUSM Department of Psychology will provide information on children’s mental health based on an ongoing study with San Diego County farmworker families. The study is funded through a CSUSM Office of Community Engagement grant aimed at increasing university and community partnerships. Free lunch will be provided and there will games for children.

“We believe that community events like this one are extremely important because migrant and farmworker families who live in this region are hard to reach yet they suffer economic insecurity, isolation from broader society and exposures to environmental hazards in their home and at work,” said NLRC Research Director Arcela Nunez-Alvarez. “We hope that more organizations and service providers will gain a better understanding of the needs these families face and that families will build greater trust with service providers.”

The event is also co-sponsored by the Farmworker CARE Coalition, founded in 2004 to address broader economic, political, environmental and social disparities which impact migrant/farmworker communities.

What: Presentation and resources for farmworker and migrant families living in Pala, Pauma and Rincon.

When: Saturday, June 27 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Where: Pauma Community Center – 16650 Highway 76, Pauma Valley, CA 92061-9524

Why: To provide farm working and migrant families with resources on how to support their children’s mental and physical health.

For more information, contact Lilian Serrano at lserrano@csusm.edu or 760-750-3504.