Camp Comunidad Kicks off at Necua and Catarina
It was a scene reminiscent of an old winery, but instead of stomping grapes, the five Los Gatos children were stomping straw into mud. The occasion was an adobe brick-making workshop sponsored by the PaiPai tribe of Santa Catarina. The children, joined by their new tribal friends, were up to their knees in a mudpit created by a natural spring. Their job was to mix in the straw, then shovel the adobe into wheelbarrows and transport it over to the area where it was poured into brick forms.
The occasion was Day Two of Camp Comunidad, a program that brings together Northern California families with the leaders, elders and children of the PaiPai and Kumeyaay tribes. Organized by Pamela Pearson, Director of Comunidad’s Escuela program, the camp is a combination of cultural exchange and ecotourism. “The goal of Camp Comunidad is dual,” she explained. “To bring together the two cultures in an educational manner that shows our American kids how another culture lives, and to help the tribes create ecotourism programs that allow them to earn a living while preserving their culture.”
The program started the evening of July …
Tribal Schools Get New Furniture
Two massive trailers filled with desks, chairs, tables and bookcases rolled out of Blossom Hill School in Los Gatos on July 6, headed for Mexicali. Donated by the Los Gatos Unified School District, the furniture will part of a complete refurbishment of the Nativo schools of Baja, with the remaining material going to the schools of Mexicali and Ensenada.
The project began in 2004, when the construction of new schools in Los Gatos began. Then Superintendent Mary Ann Park (now a Board member of Comunidad) approved the donation of the Blossom Hill furniture to Comunidad. The organization’s Director of Transportation, Bill Rush, took it from there. Working with Jim Silva’s LGUSD’s head of facilities and Karen Miller, principal of Blossom Hill, Bill organized a group of volunteers to disassemble, move, and load over 400 desks, 600 chairs and 75 tables. Led by super-volunteer Mike Lambert, the group worked for three days under a blazing sun. But on July 6 the trucks …
Bringing culture to classroom
Teacher from Mexico teaches kids about her culture, tribe.
Sonia Marquez started to cry as she thought about her trip to Hillbrook School in Los Gatos.
Everything is completely different from the school she works at in Mexico, she said. The school where she teaches is the size of one classroom at Hillbrook, and she must buy materials for her students because the government won’t supply them and parents can’t afford them.
Marquez, 42, visited Hillbrook due to a four-year partnership between the K-8 school and the Cucapah tribe. The partnership began when the nonprofit organization Comunidad Para Baja California reached out to Los Gatos schools looking for a school to “adopt” the tribe.
Hillbrook signed on immediately.
“It was very important for us to come here and teach our traditions,” Marquez said through an interpreter. Although some teachers from Hillbrook have visited the tribe in Mexico, this was Marquez’s first trip to Los Gatos.
Marquez visited Hillbrook on Thursday and Friday, teaching students some of the traditions of her culture. She showed the students a food storage basket made of willow leaves. Willow leaves, she explained, are used because bugs stay away due to their smell.
She showed the classes pottery used to carry water and …
Calendar of Upcoming Events 2006/2007
December 8-10, 2006: Facilities trip to install sanitation system at La Huerta elementary school
2007
There will be quarterly clinics in Ensenada that combine dental clinics with health fairs. Dates will be posted in January.
There will be at least 3 facilities trips down to work on tribal infrastructure (sanitation systems, school repairs and upgrades)
Comunidad will sponsor a children’s program, where Nativo children will host their California counterparts in a program that combines hiking, native traditions and games. Details of this trip to come.
If you’re interested in participating in any of the above events, please contact Tom Hogan at thogan@bajacomunidad.org.
Communing with Baja California’s Indian Nations
Sometimes you never really know where an article or a column will go. Amazing as it may seem, written words often take on a life of their own, often departing from the original intent or thoughts of the writer. For example, this column, Auka, seems to have a spirit of its own!
We first started out in hopes of communicating the history, culture, special events, news and needs of Mexico’s Kumiai people of the Guadalupe Valley area [spelled Kumiai in Baja California, and Kumeyaay north of the border]. Now in just eight weeks we’ve become a communication network for all the native peoples of Baja California, including Kumiai, Paipai, Cucapah and Kiliwa. In addition, we’re now including news and project information from Comunidad para Baja California, a volunteer organization dedicated to providing education services to improve the lives of indigenous peoples in this region of Mexico. This column is a real challenge for me personally because I have to overcome two language barriers (with the help of translators), and now I understand that staying in Spanish classes rather than skipping out to go surfing on the beaches of San Diego would of been a wiser move! Regardless of the language and …
Marketer on a mission
Tom Hogan is applying lessons on a new front that he has learned in a successful career in the trenches of corporate marketing with the likes of Oracle and Lucent.
In addition to his job as vice president of strategic services at Catapult Direct Marketing, Hogan has co-founded non-profit Comunidad para Baja California with his wife, Pamela Pearson, to implement healthcare services and educational outreach programs for extremely impoverished indigenous tribes in Northern Baja California.
A longtime human rights activist, Mr. Hogan previously taught Holocaust and Genocide studies at Santa Clara and UC Santa Cruz. He was teaching when he decided to start Comunidad, focusing his attention on 2,000 people in four native tribes of Baja living on harsh, barren land without running water, electricity, or decent sanitation and who had only minimal access to healthcare or education.
“We don’t dismiss the considerable needs here in the U.S., ” he emphasizes, expressing hope that what they are learning may become a sustainable model which can be applied in areas hard hit by recent disasters. “However, our return on investment is much greater in Baja where the dollar goes much farther and makes a bigger impact.”
Established three years ago as a …
Group uses techniques from business to bring aid to Baja California native
Tom Hogan has a unique approach for getting the word out about a nonprofit group he helped found in 2003. It involves using tactics normally reserved for profit-based companies and applying them to his nonprofit.
Hogan’s Comunidad Para Baja California is dedicated to providing health care and education outreach to improve the lives of indigenous tribes in Baja California.
Hogan, who is the vice president of strategic services for Campbell-based Catapult Direct, utilizes the expertise of the staff to reach potential donors though strategic list sourcing and the creation of targeted fundraising packages.
“Our job is to help Tom and Comunidad be more successful in soliciting donations,” says Tom Beck, president of Catapult.
To accomplish this, the staff at Catapult first identifies the key objectives and target markets for Comunidad, and then the group develops a response strategy, direct mail and email lists which support the desired market. Finally a creative approach is carefully developed and implemented.
“Everyone involved with Comunidad thinks like a businessperson,” Hogan says. “The last thing a volunteer wants to do is give up a weekend, come down to Mexico and sit around for hours waiting to do something. If someone gives us a weekend, we will make it the …
Tom Hogan, President of Comunidad para Baja California
The former technology marketing executive is applying his business savvy to the non-profit world by providing assistance to several villages in Mexico.
Tom Hogan didn’t retire from a software career to enter the field of human rights – he returned to it.
In the early 1980s, Hogan was a professor of Holocaust at Santa Clara University. . (”My friends used to say, ‘He’s a nice guy but don’t ask him about work.’ I could bring down any party…”) In 1983, Hogan met an executive from the Silicon Valley who predicted the area’s future success and recruited him to be a part of the technology industry.
“Anyone who knew me during my 15 years in high tech would not be surprised at what I’m doing now,” says Hogan. “I always assumed I’d go back to teaching and human rights. It was an easy call for me.”
The former VP of corporate marketing at Oracle, Bay Networks, Lucent and VitalSigns Software now splits his time between teaching Holocaust and Genocide Studies and his post as president of Comunidad para Baja California , a non-profit organization dedicated to providing health care and educational services to improve the lives of the indigenous tribes of Baja …