“SUEÑO CON UN MUNDO” HOW RELATIONSHIPS BECAME FOOD AT TARA HIGH SCHOOL

Dear Friends of Humanities Amped,

We have a treat for you this holiday season!

As some of you may know, Dr. Anna West, who began Humanities Amped with Destiny Cooper in 2014, is back in the classroom at Tara High this school year working with Amped students and leading our staff professional learning community. As we head into our 10th year as an organization, I’ve asked Anna to write a series of reflective stories to paint a picture of our work with our wider community. We hope to bring you one each month in 2024, and by doing so, invite you into the circle to think and dream with us. 

I would not be doing my job if I didn’t also encourage you to donate. We exist because of your generosity. There’s no other way to say it. Thanks for being part of the circle that shows up for youth, educators, and public schools. 

Sincerely,
Dexter Jackson
​Executive Director

“SUEÑO CON UN MUNDO” HOW RELATIONSHIPS BECAME FOOD AT TARA HIGH SCHOOL

The Friday before Thanksgiving I walked up the front steps at Tara High School and was greeted by my friend and collaborator, Elidsabel Martinez, a fiery and big-hearted teacher who teaches ESL Math and advocates constantly for our school’s many immigrant students. She was sitting behind an array of large brown boxes labeled “Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank” with a clipboard and a pen, ready for action. This November, East Baton Rouge Parish School System and the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank celebrated the opening of a Food Pantry at Tara High School. I was excited to see that the pantry had become a reality. Last school year, my colleagues and I often saw Elidsabel in the Humanities Amped office at Tara High during her planning period, huddled with the Amped Community Care Manager, LaChanda Harris, LCSW, making big plans.

Now that the seeds that Elidsabel and LaChanda planted have come to fruition, I asked them if I could sit down with each of them and learn more about the journey to bring a Food Pantry to Tara High School. I’m always interested in understanding more about what motivates people to roll up their sleeves to meet the unmet needs of a community, especially when the path emerges unexpectedly from relationships and experiences that no one saw coming. What are the qualities of those people, relationships, and experiences? How can we better join with others to cultivate those qualities in ourselves and the people around us, ultimately bringing forth a world where social action proliferates from many directions? Those are the inquiries that have always driven the work of Humanities Amped, and it was dawning on me that this would be a good story to tell.

I sat down one recent afternoon with Elidsabel and Alejandra Macedo, the paraprofessional who works alongside Elidsabel in their ESL Math class at Tara High. Their classroom is colorful and full, the many flags of Latin American and Middle Eastern countries brightening the room alongside tall stacks of Food Pantry boxes. In just a week’s time, Elidsabel and Alejandra have managed to sign up 28 families to receive boxes of food from the pantry, a list that is growing longer every day. While there is an actual pantry area in the middle of campus, where shelves are now filled with a generous array of canned goods, rice, snacks, bread, and more, the overflow is in this math classroom, where these remarkable women see to it that the food is distributed with fidelity and care. 

I ask Elidsabel to tell me how this all came to be. Last fall, she explains, the principal, John Hayman, asked her what she thought was behind the high rate of English Learners who often missed school, or left school altogether. According to the Department of Education, only 35% of English Learners in East Baton Rouge Parish graduated on time in 2022, compared to 75% of the total population. In other words, English Learners were, and still are, more than twice as likely to drop out of school than their peers. 

According to Elidsabel, “Mr. Hayman was asking me to think about what we can do to keep these kids in school? So I began to ask them, ‘Why are you missing so much school?’ Students were going to work because they needed to get money for their families.” Her worry about food insecurity among her students grew when a student fainted at school, and Elidsbel went with her to the hospital. “I took her home after,” she explained, “and I saw the conditions they were living in. That was when it all started for me.” Not long after, she learned that one of her students’ families was without food, electricity, or any way to pay their rent after their father was injured at work. 

​Soon, Elidsabel was providing critical food resources for three families, using her own resources. First, she dipped into her household food reserves, which she’d set aside in case of a hurricane. “I’m from Puerto Rico,” she explained, “so I am always prepared for hurricanes.” When that food ran out, she began buying basic groceries for the families. “My husband told me, ‘You are opening Pandora’s box!’ I did that for a few months until I was dipping into my savings, and then I realized I couldn’t keep that going. That’s when I reached out to Humanities Amped to ask for help.”

LaChanda Harris is the person that Elidsabel connected with. Nine times out of ten, when someone drops by the room where Humanities Amped staff work at Tara, they are looking for LaChanda, our beloved Community Care Manager. Community care expands the notion of self-care, bringing our attention to the relational, interpersonal, and systemic ways that care generates well-being in both individuals and communities. While everyone at Humanities Amped is invested in community care, LaChanda leads many of our efforts. She works with students in small groups to learn mindfulness skills; she helps people at school access tools and resources to care for themselves and their families when they need it most, and she fosters leadership among students and teachers who want to increase community care around them.

We sat down the other evening as the Amped Studio program was wrapping up to talk about LaChanda’s collaboration with Elidsabel. LaChanda explained that when she got involved she saw that the need was greater than providing “a resource, a piece of paper, or a website because most of the time you end up with nothing; the resources are overrun with requests.” LaChanda recognized that access also meant knowledge of how to navigate the resources, “I wanted to walk with them through it, and not just say, hey, here’s a resource, go get the food. I wanted to be a resource as well.” LaChanda realized that immigration status would be a barrier for many families to receive federal and state aid, so she reached out to the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank, where Program Coordinator Ariane Dent provided her with helpful information about the Food Bank’s initiative to create pantries at satellite locations throughout the community. However, the Food Bank’s waiting list was long, and Elidsabel and LaChanda knew that students and families could not wait. 

Ariane told them about another Food Bank program that would equip them to send students home on Fridays with backpacks containing snacks. They met with Mr. Hayman to work out the logistics, and as soon as they received the backpacks, distribution began. Elidsabel and Rocio Vargas made sure that 103 Tara High Students, most of them English Learners, got on the list to take home backpacks. Elidsabel explains, “With those backpacks, whole families ate. Four-member families were surviving for a week on the food from those backpacks, which were just a handful of snacks meant for children. I don’t know how they did it, but they did.” 

In the meantime, LaChanda and Elidsabel visited the Food Pantry at Glen Oaks High School. LaChanda had a relationship with Chef Traci Vincent, a health coach and food educator involved with the Glen Oaks High School Food Bank. They got practical advice on how to run the pantry and got to see what a fully stocked pantry with a refrigerator, a freezer, and perishable items, including fresh produce, could look like. They went back to the Food Bank to see if there was a way to get equipment for perishables, and the Food Bank connected them to the LSU Agricultural Center, who then came on board and applied for a grant. If received, the grant will allow the Food Pantry to add refrigeration and fresh produce to Tara’s Food Pantry.

​Just as things were getting off the ground last school year, everything came to a temporary halt. The school system needed to ensure that the proper safety procedures were in place. Legal protections and waivers needed to be established. Mr. Hayman, LaChanda, Elidsabel, and the school system administrators worked together to untangle those knots. It was a long process. “At Humanities Amped, we don’t stop at ‘there’s nothing we can do’,” LaChanda explained, “If we don’t know how to get it, we research how we can connect to other entities who do know. We knock on other doors because we know there is a way. And if there is not a way, we are going to try and build it.” I have seen many projects break down at the point when it becomes administratively tricky to move through systems, especially when it is no one’s job in particular and there is no clear guidance on how to move forward. That’s when it becomes about a willingness to persist through those stretches of uncertainty, keeping a moral compass attuned to what is right for youth and families. 

As if on cue, Principal John Hayman happened to walk by when LaChanda and I were talking. We asked him for his thoughts, and he told us, “Humanities Amped meets the need. No matter what it is. There doesn’t seem to be a boundary when it comes to helping kids.” He reflected on the role of Humanities Amped at Tara, noting that Amped fills a critical gap by providing “knowledge and coordination of resources. We don’t have that.” This speaks to the importance of school-community partnerships in general, which is something that the school system is working to prioritize alongside Baton Rouge Area Youth Network. BRAYN is building a coordinated network for local youth services that can partner thoughtfully with schools to ensure that young people and families are getting access to community resources in a more consistent and equitable way. 

In his characteristically humble and warm manner, Mr. Hayman recognized the role that LaChanda and Elidsabel played. “The pantry exists because of Ms. Harris and Ms. Martinez. They are the unsung heroes,” he explains. “But [giving credit] doesn’t really matter, because at the end of the day, it’s my prediction, optimistically, that 150 to 200 families [will access this resource]. Over half of our families already qualify, once they understand that they can save that money, it will open up other opportunities for them.” Mr. Hayman’s insight that “the credit doesn’t matter” is one of the reasons I wanted to write about this. Of course, I want to sing the song of unsung heroes, especially when they are people who I both know and respect, but I also want to shed light on the generosity of everyday people who dive into the often tedious, often invisible, labor of caring for their community. It is a tender thing to convey in a world where the discourses, branding, and a constant vying for visibility seem to get swapped out, mixed up, with the material and grounded realities of everyday community care. 

​Relationships are at the heart of that kind of care. LaChanda explains how important relationships are to the work of Humanities Amped. “It’s all about building a relationship,” she tells me. “That’s how we meet needs. If there is no relationship, then people are not going to be vulnerable enough to tell us what their needs are.” Relationships not only create safety for people to surface their genuine needs they also awaken empathy between people. Elidsabel elaborates on how empathy moved her to action:

Let me tell you, I didn’t know anything about any of this when I started. I just saw such a need. I would get home and I’d cry, I’d ask myself, ‘How is this possible?’ I’ve always had the things I needed. You begin to see what it is like for others, and you have to ask yourself, “What are you going to do?” I never thought it would grow to be so big. I just thought this family needs help. And now this family too. It wasn’t something I planned to do. These are things that happen in life, and you have to respond. Because what are you going to do? How are you going to feel if you have food in your house, and you know that your students and their families don’t? You don’t even think about it, you just say, we’re going to share what we have for as long as we can.

Elidsabel, Lachanda, and the many others who worked to bring the Food Pantry to Tara High School were moved to action by public commitments that are grounded in love for the people around them. I’m reminded of Cornell West’s words, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” We don’t hear enough stories about the loved-filled relationships that catalyze educators and students in public schools. Indeed, public schools are often frustrating– though rarely boring– public spaces where people can show up in public to care for others. The quality of relationships in public schools are, perhaps, the first building blocks of a viable democracy. Maybe this is why public school board meetings have become the epicenter the more recent culture wars battleground? Something about these relationships and how we will (or won’t) steward them is ground zero of the question, what country do we want to live in? 

​Last school year I was fortunate enough to teach alongside Elidsabel in one of her classes, and last winter, our students studied the Langston Hughes poem, “I Dream a World.” We read and re-read the poem, letting it lead us into conversations about the worlds that we dream of, and what we might do to move closer to those worlds. With the help of Amped board member Kevin McQuarn, we recorded a video of students in several classes reading the poem out loud.

Today, Elidsabel reminds me of the poem, telling me,

“Yo sueño con un mundo/I dream a world/ donde la escuela puede ser un refugio/where school can be a sanctuary/por los estudiantes y sus familias/for students and their families. /Sueño con tener bastante comida, uniformes y servicios de la salud mental/I dream of having enough food, uniforms, and mental health care./ Si pudierimos alcanzar esos necisidades/ If we can meet those needs/ los estudiantes estarán en la escuela/ students will be at school.”

Who, I wonder, does not want to see a dream like that come true? Our conversation, filled with laughter and tears, soon turned, as it usually does when we talk for any length of time, into a list of next steps to continue turning dreams into realities, one small step at a time.  

​“I have so many ideas, but I am just one person,” she tells me. “I had the idea, but without Humanities Amped it would not have gone anywhere. LaChanda helped me so much. She was the one who connected me to people who moved things forward.” Those relationships between people who are reaching for a greater horizon together, what Martin Luther King called the “Beloved Community” is a source of hope, even when the odds feel quite long. “We need the community to know that we have this here,” Elidsabel tells me, “so that it can keep growing.”

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Dr. Anna West is an Amped Educator. Over the span of twenty-two years, Anna has been a steward of multiple community youth organizations, including Humanities Amped, that focus on the intersection of literary arts, humanities, and social change. ​