Editor’s note: Amigos805 welcomes guest columns, letters to the editor and other submissions from our readers. All opinions expressed in submitted material are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the viewpoint of Amigos805.
By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor
Cinco de Mayo, 2021
At the Keys to Empower You in the System (KEYS) Leadership Academy, which was housed at the Café on A, Oxnard, we believed that the best community safety is where all adults, young adults, kids and everyone else in Oxnard (all the cities of this nation) feels a real sense of civic involvement and transparency, responsibility of ownership, peace, love and respect. We know full well that safety is mostly perceptual, thus any community safety program must incorporate a rigorous mental health and wellness component. We have relied much too long on “traditional policing” alone to bring us safety. As a sobering reminder, let us not forget that Oxnard is yearly designated by highly reputable demographers as one of the safest cities in the country for it size in the entire nation.
Yet, we have often let others assign us the “bum rap” about “crime riddled Oxnard”. We have often be responsible and complicit in perpetuating our cities’ “bad rap” label as being “taken over by gangbangers, terrorist and drug dealers” by enacting bonehead quick fix and stupid local laws, ordinances that are supervised exclusively by cops like the Oxnard Civil “Gang” Injunction, the punitive and astronomical fines for “graffiti and tagging” misdemeanor offenses, cops in every public city school, PALS, DARE, and CalGrip to mention just a few OPD missteps. These costly missteps by the OPD did nothing to make us “feel” safer, they only helped the community become more militarized and polarized. There is a better, cheaper and more inclusive path to community safety, but we have to think outside of the proverbial and obsolete police model.
We can and must change our perception of community safety, from irrational fear, blind and lazy ignorance and an “us versus them” hate mentality, to active all inclusive and active love. We must embrace a new vision of community safety and how we view our youth, the homeless, the immigrants, folks that don’t look like us and embrace the diversity and differences that make us in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties uniquely beautiful and special, rather than suspect and to be feared.
About 15 years ago a group of concerned members and friends of the KEYS Leadership Academy began actively discuss the need to bring under one community umbrella the various mental health “remedies”, programs, therapies, ideas and suggestion we were all sharing with one another due largely to the acute lack of traditional mental health service in our community, and that is where the Oxnard Multicultural Mental Health (OMMH) Coalition was born.
At OMMH we came to call these cultural and historic “remedios” community defined wellness practices. Initially, we were often dumbfounded, numb, institutionally handcuffed and reluctant to believe what we were actively taking part in our healing and witnessing real efficacy in our confessional remedies and healing mesas redondas. We, incorrectly, assume that our brave and courageous woman and men must need, must have the traditional mental health service to address their mental illness. We ignore the facts, disrespect the gut wrenching testimony, and more importantly the prima facie healing evidence presented before us by our courageous sisters and brothers that real healing was occurring before our own eyes. Slowly over the years we came to trust and embrace own ethnically and culturally congruent mental health remedies and modalities, because they work!
For this very reason place like the Café on A that housed OMMH and other CBO location are so important to the countless thousands of our friends, supporters, youth and family members, of Oxnard and to the County of Ventura, that over the past two decades have sought out love, refuge, a place to heal from the mental storms that torment so many of our people. It was in these community sanctuaries, like the Café on A where our marginalized sisters and brother felt safe, respected and loved. Working together with other established and traditional mental health providers was the key. OMMH partnered with LULAC, Clinicas, the County of Ventura along with our many other community partners so that we could better recruit, enroll, serve and help bring healing to our special population’s communities and help them with their mental health issues and most importantly their mental health wellness.
At OMMH our objective was to dramatically improve the collaborative partnership in the county of Ventura so all people who suffer from mental illness can receive the best and most comprehensive mental health services and programs available that they so deserve! At OMMH we practiced a number of highly successful community defined wellness programs, classes and activities. Below is a partial list of our community defined mental health wellness practices activities that through our OMMH partnerships we developed over the years.
The Friends of the Earth Collective, use primarily clay, and other organic material for meditative art and healing activities and therapies. Out of this artistic and healing collective two of the great ceramicist of the world are teaching, demonstrating and working with our art friends in Oxnard. Arte Cura! We feel it, we sit it and we embrace it! We have Las Salseras One Love exercise, dance Entre Mujeres group, dedicated to physical exercise, healthy life choices and nightly intimate “platicas entre mujeres”, trusted and wide ranging talks form mental illness and wellness to ideas of social activism to improve the community.
The Dual Diagnostic Group is small intimate gather of community folk that suffer from multiple mental health issues; we are making tremendous breakthroughs in working toward mental wellness. Create Not Destroy is a multicultural youth arts group that works to address youth angst, rage and pain through love, understanding, empathy, music, art and dance. They have a concert planned for tonight, come join them at the Café one.
The Peace Group meets weekly and they work to spread the concept of peace and love through self-realization, it is within us all, they are wonderful culturally congruent community ambassadors. Artist for Peace is a group of veterans and other community folk that are working to end militarism in our country and our community, they plan an activist peace fair for September of this year, and we will keep you posted.
The KEYS Leadership Academy has been providing educational, social justice, arts, business and civic classes and community improvement projects for over two decades. Currently we are working on art as a social justice tool. The Oxnard Writers is gathering of local published, self- published and soon to be published poets, writers and playwrights who make OMMH their weekly home and they bounce mental pain and wellness as well as literary ideas and support. We plan to have a local Oxnard Book Fair at the end of the year.
The Oxnard College Coalition is composed of artist, activist student, scholars and associated student government officers who have made OMMH their headquarters and use the intimacy of the Café on A to plan progressive activities for youth and students through the greater Oxnard plains. The Hip-Hop Coalition of Oxnard is a group of youth that plan, schedule and hold music concerts, social justice forums, and community improvement projects through the year, one of the principal goals to provide more water safety class and universal beach access to all kids and their families in Oxnard.
The LGBTQO Group is working to redefine the parameters and discussion beyond the traditional “box” that has been articulated, at OMMH these mostly young folk have a safe haven to explore, discuss and create whatever identity they defines themselves.
In the wake of the life altering and deadly Covid-19 pandemic, the traitorous insurrection on our democracy by Trump and his complicit lapdogs, the horrific and unconscionable killing of people of color by the police, now more than ever we need congruent user friendly mental health services readily available throughout our communities. Love, compassion, and empathy will lead the way toward the greater safety and security of minds and hearts that we all deserve.
In the work that Deborah DeVries and I continue to do through the KEYS Leadership Academy, OMMH, The Acuna Art Collective in Oxnard, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, we work with many at-promise youth and adults, along with their families who have been abandoned or had lost hope and faith in themselves. Most of these “lost children” we work with are terrified and looking for their lost childhood, love and belongs — often in the wrong places, always in desperation.
For many, their search may lead them to alcohol, drugs, prostitution, gangs or abusive relationships. Others will somehow manage to find a way to live a “normal” life. What all are looking for is love. It has been our experience that an incredible transformation and empowerment can take place in all who are touched by the power of unconditional love. So, when Debbie and I promote this idea in the work we do, we are often met with skepticism.
We press on with our unconditional love and have found that even the most troubled souls respond to this approach.
Here is our seven-step approach to our unconditional love philosophy:
1. Unconditional love is unconditional acceptance of the person asking for a helping hand. Unconditional acceptance does not make demands on the individual. We accept the obvious fact that the individual has perhaps lost the road map to life (or perhaps just taken a wrong turn); either way, unconditional love will eventually redirect the individual.
2. Unconditional love will produce loving individuals, and then everything in this person’s life is possible. All the behavior demanded, such as personal accountability, responsibility and resourcefulness that the individual could never master before will eventually be a natural by-product of unconditional love.
3. Unconditional love is action-driven. It requires the servant provide individualized services to the client. The servant cannot deliver unconditional love with empty hands; the servant must engage power and institutions so goods and services are unconditionally made available.
4. Unconditional love will eventually inoculate even the most troubled client, transforming the client into the servant.
5. Unconditional love is fearless. Even when the task seems impossible, it will find a way.
6. Unconditional love is forever. There are no time frames, schedules or deadlines. The servant understands a client may backslide a few or a hundred times. It does not matter. Eventually, unconditional love will liberate this client.
7. Unconditional love is available to each of us, and we can all practice it, but first we must learn to lead and act with the heart.
We at the KEYS Leadership Academy request that we give the greatest gift we can: the gift of unconditional love to every one of our sisters and brothers that we love, meet, and serve. It will bring love, peace and happiness to all who receive it.
— Armando Vazquez, M.Ed., founding member of CORE and the Acuna Art Gallery and Community Collective.
