Partnership for Citizenship and Civic Engagement (CVP)

Location and Context
The 450-mile-long Central Valley of California, predominantly rural in character, is home for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from every continent worldwide. This "hidden community" located between the Sierra Nevada and California's Coastal Ranges is a virtual third-world area within one of America's most prosperous states. A vast agricultural industry dominates the valley and more wealth is created every year by this industry than was created in all the years of gold mining in California. The industry has also been served by inexpensive labor, traditionally immigrant. While most working residents are in agriculture or services, unemployment in the Valley has been persistently higher, with household income 20% lower, than in the state as a whole. Demographically the valley has become extremely diverse. Although the proportion of Anglos is dropping to below 50%, the Valley's governing and civic elites remain largely Anglo. Latino, Asian, and Slavic communities are growing rapidly, mostly due to the growth of immigrant and refugee populations. Among the Latino population, a very significant proportion are undocumented.

Collaborative Structure and Strategy
Since 1996, the Central Valley Partnership (CVP) has supported migrant, immigrant, and refugee communities in California’s Central Valley working to achieve social and institutional change—change that provides the opportunity for all who reside in the Valley to live in dignity and good health, participate fully in decisions that affect their lives, and assume the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in its broadest sense. It seeks to expand opportunities for community leaders and organizations to promote civic participation, and to strengthen the capacity of community groups, leaders, and organizations to secure policy change that increases institutional accountability to, affirms the human rights of, and facilitates the acquisition of legal status and naturalization for immigrants, migrants, and refugees.

Fourteen CVP organizations collaboratively apply 20 programs that encompass diverse but complementary approaches. These include community organizing, youth organizing, social research, popular education and participatory research, cultural work, legal assistance, advocacy, and immigration and naturalization services and classes. The synergy provided by this diversity inspired several collaborative programs, including the Civic Action Network (CAN) program which has provided grants and workshops to 147 Valley grassroots immigrant organizations; the Immigrant Leaders Fellowship program (ILF) that recruits, engages, and trains emerging immigrant leaders; the Youth Organizing for Equal Justice and Education program that builds the skills, voice, and power of Valley youth conducting research and organizing for educational equity and justice; the provision of expert immigration and naturalization assistance to thousands of immigrants annually; and the Tamejavi Cultural Exchange Project. The CVP now seeks to dovetail these efforts into the creation of a network and process that will lead to a community-driven and proactive policy agenda aimed at energizing civic participation among immigrants and driving systemic change in the Central Valley.

Until 2003, the CVP functioned as a working collaborative with no formal governing board or staff of its own. Now it is recognized by California as a nonprofit organization and is applying for its federal 501(c)3 nonprofit status. A board of directors oversees the collaborative’s development, direction, and policies. The work of each collaborative program is overseen and supported by CVP standing committees. A CVP coordinator, Noe Paramo, provides staff support and coordination to board and committee efforts, and directs the ILFP.

Leverage and Impact
The CVP is a learning collaborative. By promoting citizenship and active civic participation among immigrants, it hopes to compare best practices, organize forums to explore issues, and cooperatively build learning and program agendas for each of its gatherings to demonstrate how a sustained, disciplined approach to immigrant education and organizing can lead to community transformation through empowerment of immigrant leadership and civic engagement.

The CVP is creating a proactive public policy agenda that effectively spans hundreds of miles, diverse languages and cultures, varying technical and physical individual capacities, and uneven levels of literacy, and which creates and employs multimedia presentations at every stage—from articulating needs and collecting stories that reflect diverse language and cultural nuances to polished policy proposals suitable for distribution to ethnic and mainstream media or use in presentations to policymakers.