Advancing Hope
For Gloria Rodriguez and her nonprofit
group, Avance,
preservation is a critical tool in the fight against
poverty.
BY CHRISTOPHER SWOPE
In 1973, when Gloria G. Rodriguez was
in her 20s, she began knocking on doors in San Antonio's
Mirasol housing project, not far from the small wood-frame
house where she grew up. Mirasol was then a notoriously
violent corner of the West Side barrio, ruled by Mexican
gangs. Rodriguez, a former teacher concerned about
school dropout rates, was searching for mothers with
infants. She'd ask any madre who opened the door
the same question: "Do you love your child?"
Rodriguez wooed dozens of moms, most of them high
school dropouts, into her weekly parenting classes.
They learned the basics of brain development and early-childhood
learning. They found out about community lifelines
such as free health clinics. When she staged graduation
ceremonies for the mothers and their kids, complete
with tiny caps and gowns, Rodriguez knew that she
had equipped these families for success.
Only years later could she prove it with statistics:
Although 91 percent of the women in her first class
had never finished high school, 94 percent of their
children graduated, and more than half went on to
college. In three decades of running the nonprofit
Avance
(the word rhymes with "fianc?" and means "to advance"
in Spanish), Rodriguez has learned that it takes patience
to turn around lives shadowed by poverty.
|
|
|
An interior building of Avance
(Courtesy of Avance)
|
That's why Rodriguez, who has curly
black hair and a permanent smile, doesn't get too upset
about the homeless people clustered under the bridge
near Avance's new San Antonio headquarters?except when
the stench of urine wafts upwind. Nor does she much
mind the crowds of day laborers, Mexican men wearing
baseball caps who hang around on the sidewalk waiting
for jobs. She figures that what is going on inside Avance's
building, a lovingly restored former hotel, will eventually
change what goes on outside it.
For more of this story,
subscribe
to the magazine, look for the September/October
2005 issue on newsstands, or e-mail
us to purchase a copy.
Read more excerpts from our current
issue.
|
