The hub of social programs and government outreach needs to become unforgettable
After spending most of its history in “la trailita”—a double-wide trailer parked next to Poet’s Park—the Beach Flats Community Center (BFCC) thought it had found a permanent home in 2003, when the Santa Cruz Redevelopment Agency completed construction of the colorful Nueva Vista housing development at 133 Liebrandt Avenue. The community center was given space at the heart of the ground floor with a computer lab, day-care center, and classrooms, surrounded by 48 units of low to very-low income housing. But only five years later, what the city had given would now be taken away; the building still stands, but the public funding for the BFCC, what Resource Coordinator Reyna Ruiz calls “the liaison between Beach Flats and the city government,” has disappeared into the void of deep budget cuts and economic woes.
Ruiz is determined to keep the center open, and to continue the educational support and community intervention efforts it has engaged in for 15 years. Those efforts have been a significant part of the transformation of the Beach Flats neighborhood, an island of Spanish-speaking renters hemmed in by the motels of Beach Hill, the Boardwalk amusement park, the mouth of the San Lorenzo River, and the daunting slope of West Cliff Drive. What was once a crime-ridden and underdeveloped region has slowly reformed into a family-oriented neighborhood with strong internal ties and a fierce, almost iconoclastic character. The area’s reputation might live on—Beach Flats is often the butt of quiet jokes about apartments in Santa Cruz—but the facts say that in 2008, you were more likely to have your car stolen in Seabright than in Beach Flats, more like to be a victim of burglary in The Circles than in Beach Flats, and twice as likely to be assaulted downtown than in Beach Flats.
Nevertheless, the neighborhood remains seemingly isolated, both by its geography and demographics, from the rest of the city. The BFCC has not had a very high profile in the city at large, since it has concentrated primarily on serving its neighborhood, but Ruiz says the attitude about Beach Flats’ isolation needs to change. “Beach Flats is not isolated. The families are deeply integrated into every aspect of the Santa Cruz community,” she says. “They work in the restaurants, hotels, and businesses around town. They are the main support for the tourism industry. They attend our city schools, and the kids play soccer at parks around town.”
The BFCC has tried to become more integrated with the nonprofit community as well, to further raise its profile and garner new types of support. As a city entity, the center never needed a comprehensive fundraising strategy, or a board of advisors. After the cuts, however, the center had to build those within a matter of months. While money is critically important, in the early stages it has been the concrete help of volunteers that has enabled BFCC to imagine an independent future.
Ruiz has a long list of individuals and groups who have come forward with support: Bridges to Kinder offered the use of its board for fundraising efforts in addition to donating $1,650; Ross Newport at Community Printers quickly put together a website (beachflatscommunitycenter.org) to help coordinate communication efforts; Hilary Bryant of Santa Cruz Sunrise Rotary Club is part of a growing Facebook group started on Jan. 13 geared toward spreading information (garnering 153 members as of press time), and she is also putting on a fundraiser at the Cypress Lounge on Jan. 28; and the Boys & Girls Club of Santa Cruz has come forward to offer an umbrella for several children’s programs run by the center, and the two entities are currently negotiating a win-win way to work together. The list stretches on, and grows by the day.
However, without traditional ties to deep pockets, the amount BFCC needs to raise in order to stay open as an independent entity—$122,000 by June 30, with $16,240 raised to date, leaving $105,760 to go—looms large. It’s not the biggest amount of money being worried over in the community. (By comparison, Shakespeare Santa Cruz announced a need of $300,000, and raised $416,417.) But it is a significant hurdle for a highly active organization serving a mostly low-income constituency.
“People need to realize that this money, the $122,000, is not an expense,” Ruiz says. “It’s an investment.” The majority of the center’s work is geared at early childhood and families, providing safety and pride to a segment of the population that can be left behind—schools’ best efforts notwithstanding. As a de facto liaison between government agencies and the largely Spanish-speaking population of Beach Flats (40 percent of which is monolingual), BFCC makes an average of 1,400 contacts with 150 families every month.
Programs at the center include a K-12 tutoring service, a co-op school with mandatory parent participation, neighborhood clean-ups, family art projects every Friday throughout summer, parenting and family workshops, the PAPAS Father Involvement Project, computer classes, free nursing care in conjunction with San Jose State University, the popular and beloved community gardens (which engaged in a separate fight for survival with the Seaside Company last year), a community supported agriculture program for distributing organic food, a Mexican Folkloric Ballet troupe called Raices de Santa Cruz, holiday party planning, help with government forms and programs, and outings to all sorts of places from Giants games to Loch Lomond.
Taken together, the BFCC’s programs offer a comprehensive approach to integrating Beach Flats and its families in the greater Santa Cruz community. This turns out to be the most cost-effective way to prevent a low-income neighborhood from becoming crime-ridden. Those who have not grown up in poverty—or with the threat of poverty looming around the corner constantly—take for granted the feeling of belonging in society, that idea that the community’s institutions, businesses, and services are there for participation. Without active outreach, however, low-income neighborhoods can become detached from the everyday services—the libraries and art programs and communal celebrations—and see only the grinding paperwork and dreary sustenance of the government’s threadbare safety net. Add in a language barrier, and it can be all too easy to cast adrift the children of the barrio.
Ruiz takes me for a walk. With her young son David in tow—he races forward a half block then stops at his mother’s call, waiting for us to catch up before jumping and skipping ahead again—she points out the playground administered by BFCC, which would be shuttered if the center were to close down. She arrived here in 1991 to attend UC Santa Cruz, having grown up in South Central Los Angeles. “When I looked around for a similar community, I guess the most similar was Beach Flats,” she says as we round one of the neighborhood’s tight and eccentric corners. “But I always thought it was a really manageable scale, in terms of making a difference. In LA a lot of businesses and organizations have deinvested, especially from youth. They keep throwing money at some kind of relief, but it’s kind of hard. Here, it always seemed doable. You’ve got a small neighborhood with lots of resources. And when I talk about resources, I don’t necessarily mean money. Money’s important, but sometimes it’s more about a willingness to make a difference. And that’s something I found in Beach Flats.”
We drop David off at a quaint house, called the Playhouse, where a day care provider lives. “It’s not just that we have deep ties with the city,” Ruiz continues. “We are the city. For 15 years, the city has had a presence in Beach Flats through us. It’s been a continuous investment, and when that gets pulled out without any transition, the big question becomes, how do you reorganize? We just need more time. Closing is not an option.” The city has agreed to keep the lights on and the water running, and is willing to rent the current space to BFCC for $1 a year. From there, it’s up to the center, and anyone willing to support it, to keep the programs alive. “This is the safe place for the most vulnerable part of Santa Cruz,” she concludes. “I hope that we have done enough work to justify our continuance, and I would hope that we’ve even done enough that the community could continue without us, but I just think we need more time, because in this economy the need has only increased.”
We come back to the towers of Nueva Vista, and suddenly a blast of triumphant mariachi trumpets comes from one of the windows above. Ruiz and I smile. “That’s what I like about Beach Flats,” she says. “It might be the only neighborhood in Santa Cruz where you can play your music that loud and nobody gets angry.”
To help BFCC reach its fundraising goal, go to Cypress Lounge, 120 Union St., on Jan. 28 at 7 p.m., where the Sambanova Brazilian Dance Band will entertain. $20 admission includes wine and appetizers. For more information, visit beachflatscommunitycenter.org.
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