FORUMS & LETTERS

Editor,

The “We Live Here and We Give Here” conference, August 3–5 at the Biblioteca was excellent—well planned, good topics, terrific speakers, great documentation and wonderful networking opportunities. I applaud Alexis White, Ali Zerriffi and the other Organizational Working Group members for creating The San Miguel Project and organizing this conference together with the speakers, Gregory Diamant and Biblioteca staff. In particular, I would like to thank Bob Leonard and Professors Sharon Parsons and Cynthia Lynch for their great and informative presentations.

Atención readers should visit www.thesanmiguelproject.org to understand how many terrific community service organizations are active here, and what they are doing to benefit the children and adults of our community, and in a few cases our foreign community. The SMP website is a tremendous resource that we need to publicize and utilize. Of course, a lot of work remains to make it complete, but the design is excellent and easy to navigate.

Enabling the many community service organizations in San Miguel to know more about each other’s goals and activities is a tremendous benefit, and it promotes closer collaboration between those that have common objectives and serve overlapping groups within our diverse community.

I learned a lot from the conference speakers and the workshop sessions, and I particularly appreciated having the opportunity to meet so many fascinating people who are doing so many different things for the people of our town and elsewhere. Having those two computers in the Biblioteca with free (to us) access to the world of foundation grants in the US and Mexico is a remarkable achievement which, if we can all work together to exploit that great asset, will open up many additional sources of funding to relieve the pressure on our local funding sources and help to minimize the sense of competition for money between our non-profit organizations.

One specific idea that emerged from our workshop sessions with Bob Leonard was for The SMP to develop a list of English-to-Spanish translators who understand the background of what motivates foreigners to provide all of these charitable programs, so that we are able to convey our underlying goals and objectives in a meaningful way to the children and adults we want to benefit.

Another idea that emerged that may be important is to develop a matrix listing the organizations versus the specific communities they serve—such as age groups or geographic areas—and the area of focus of the organization—such as education (language, arts, music, scholarships), health, housing, nutrition, psychology, disabilities and vocational skills. I believe this would enable us to identify which organizations would benefit from working closely together.



It’s always amazing what we can achieve when working together in one of these organizations. I think we will be amazed also at what can be done when all the organizations are collaborating effectively to reach our common goals. The San Miguel Project is a big step forward in this direction.

Russ Archibald