By Diana Pando
This month we are spotlighting one of The Resurrection Project’s community organizers, Mayra López. Discover how she is making an impact on the community and why she loves the Back of the Yards neighborhood.  Read full article below…
What types of services does the organizing department at The Resurrection Project (TRP) offer the community?
Our department offers some direct services programs in the community but mainly we do leadership development in Pilsen, Back of the Yards, and Little Village neighborhoods. We try to get leaders involved in these campaigns to really take ownerships of a specific campaign. We get our leaders to collect signatures, talk to legislators and invite them to come out, and share their stories of why this is important. We’re TRP’s hybrid department providing services and organizing because we really want to bring a better quality of life to the residents of our community.
One of the main issues we work on is immigration reform / issues. We have a few days left during this session to see if there is going to be some immigration reform but it looks really tough. I think we’ve done so much work this year that are leaders are not going to throw in the towel and next year we’re going to come back with more energy to really get something to happen because now you’re starting to hear Republican leadership in Congress talk about something being done on immigration reform in 2014.
How did you get involved with The Resurrection Project (TRP)?
I’ve been working for TRP for 2 ½ years. I was brought on because we started to do more intentional work in Back of the Yards. We’ve always worked there but not to the level that we are working there now. TRP really believes in this idea that we’re not just bricks and mortars, but that we’re really about the grassroots work and issues happening in the community. In order to do that we need to organize from within.
I’m also a Back of the Yards resident and what drew me to TRP was that there are few resources in my neighborhood. Nothing was being done through an organizing lens. So I wanted to come on board and help TRP with that aspect.
My passion is education and building relationships to help organize from within the schools. At the beginning of my work we were really focusing on this issue of in the new Back of the Yards High School and making sure it was going to be an open high school for people in community. Then I started connecting with the elementary schools and the opportunity to open and expand the parent mentor program in Back of the Yards. The parent mentor program is a way to engage parents who have never been involved in children’s schools before, so these are new parents and we make it a lot friendlier and easier for them to be engaged. We develop them as leaders within the school but also in the community to really get them to understand the school can’t be much better if the community is not getting better itself.
I’m an immigrant child myself and my parents motivated me to get an education and understand its values even though they did not know how to navigate the education system. This is what motivates me to go back and work with parents, because if parents understand how the system works, they can do a lot more for their children.
What do you love about Back of the Yards?
There are so many good people in the community and all of this potential to do great things in the area. But because it’s always overshadowed by the negative things, many people don’t see it. If you live there, you know there are a lot of good things happening in the community. We have a long history in Chicago but people just don’t know about it and there can be a lot of pride once people know the history. People often say they’ve never heard of Back of the Yards, but once you mention the streets they begin to say things like, “When I first got to this country I lived there for a year or we used to shop there.” People have connections to the neighborhood but they just don’t realize it sometimes.
What do you think are some opportunities for the community of Back of the Yards?
What’s really exciting is that we are going to have municipal elections in 2015. So next year there will be people campaigning really hard in our neighborhood to get out the vote. And because of some of the work we’ve done to consolidate the number of wards in Back of the Yards, we might have a chance to elect one of our own to become alderman. That’s important because one of the reasons we don’t have resources is that we have three different congressional districts and a whole bunch of different wards. This upcoming election is an opportunity for our leaders to get involved in local politics.
 

Return to Nueva Vida December 2013 here.