Weaving Relationships, Shifting Mental Models: An Interview with Sayra Pinto (from Leverage Points Issue 72)

Sayra Pinto is the director of the Twin Cities Latino Coalition, a community organization in northern Massachusetts that applies systems thinking concepts in building cross-sectoral alliances with the aim of ensuring that Latino families achieve their highest potential. In a forum session at the November Pegasus Conference, Sayra and coalition partners Ed Cronin, the chief of police in Fitchburg, MA, Dr. Daniel Asquino, the president of Mt. Wachusett Community College, Dr. Sergio Paez of the Leominster Public Schools, Angelita Santiago of the Fitchburg Public Schools, and Neddy Latimer, Executive Director of the Spanish American Center in Leominster, will share stories and lessons from their work together.

LP: What was happening in Fitchburg and Leominster that necessitated this regional initiative to support education in the Latino community?

SP: These “twin cities” are experiencing a number of issues universal to smaller urban centers. For decades, they have been in economic decline. And over the same period, the Latino community has grown exponentially; it now comprises 40 percent of the total population of Fitchburg and 22.5 percent of the total population of Leominster. Nevertheless, over the last 35 years, there has been little progress in integrating Latinos into the mainstream community here. Leadership is needed to ensure access to employment, good housing, and education.

LP: What efforts had been made in this area prior to the inception of the Coalition, and how did they set the stage for your work?

SP: The Spanish American Center has been working steadily at the grassroots level for almost 40 years. Under the direction of Neddy Latimer and Angelita Santiago, they have built a network of people with a reputation for being credible, compassionate, and values-driven. But various dynamics—racism and poverty—have kept them pretty isolated and limited. With the confluence of forces supported by the emergence of the Coalition, I hope we can help the Center expand from a reactive social service framework to become the locus for leadership development work in the Latino community.

Another leader who has been pivotal in this area is Dr. Asquino. As president of the local community college for the last 19 years, he has been building an agenda around civic engagement and service learning while encouraging the college to be rooted in the community. He has, in his own way, been building capacity for the region to meet these leadership challenges.

LP: Tell us how the Coalition goes about its work.

SP: It originated as part of a larger effort, funded by the Kellogg Foundation, to assemble cross-sector multi-stakeholder teams to look at educational challenges for the Latino community in three Massachusetts cities: Holyoke, Worcester, and the twin cities area.

We were the only group that took a systems thinking approach and committed to having a broad community development agenda. We knew that the key to sustainable systemic change lay in shifting mental models. So, we adopted the approach of using organizational structures already engaged in some kind of systemic change effort—grassroots, business, civic, or educational structures—and infusing the concepts of dialogue and values alignment to help stakeholders talk with and understand each other.

The Coalition’s strategic plan includes three critical goals: to improve Latino educational outcomes, to increase parent engagement, and to decrease the systemic barriers that stand in the way of our accomplishment. The first thing we do is identify the areas of support and value that we can bring to each key stakeholder group.

The second thing we do is promote the concept of dialogue in whatever way, shape, and form works best for the stakeholders. We try to build the capacity of those different sectors to come together and have meaningful conversation about solving complex problems relating to the Latino community.

The third thing we do is promote continuous learning. We are constantly finding new ways to bring people together around some really hard questions and keep them engaged in a kind of discovery process.

The last thing we do is create demonstration projects, so participants can see immediate results. For example, last summer, we collaborated with the police department, department of social services, department of youth services, community college, schools, and other nonprofits to create a summer parks program. It began as the result of a dialogue about making sure that kids would have access to free meals over the summer. We found out that there was not enough supervision at the parks for them to be suitable distribution points for free meals. To address the issue and provide jobs for youths, we created stipends for them to provide activities and free food for others who showed up at three parks. The safety level in the neighborhood improved immediately. Crime decreased in the summer months for the first time.

The other outcome, besides the benefit to the kids, was an increase in the capacity for collaboration between people in the agencies and different institutions. Now there are 25 community stakeholders asking for an extension of the project. This sense of shared initiative is a critical thing for a depressed community.

LP: Are you getting support from elected officials and city management?

SP: The mayor of Fitchburg is a Republican. The mayor of Leominster is a Democrat. There are some really interesting bipartisan collaborations emerging. We’re not trying to build from scratch. We are identifying areas where there are capacities that may not necessarily be recognized but that are present. And we’re energizing those areas and bringing them to full attention.

LP: Have you seen dramatic shifts in your coalition partners’ mental models?

SP: I want to talk a little bit about the role of the police. As the chief of police, Ed Cronin had been sitting with the underbelly of all these dynamics. It’s one thing to say, “We need to increase Latino academic achievement”; that’s a nice, forward-thinking goal. But more often than not, it’s the police who end up dealing with the 40 percent of the young people who don’t graduate from high school.

Ed discovered that arresting the problem away doesn’t work; even when the arrest rate goes up, the crime rate stays the same. So, the question was, if what you know is no longer helping you solve the problem, what do you do? I have watched Ed emerge as a leader who is invested in understanding the problem on a systemic level and engaging in a deep listening process to connect profoundly with the situation at hand. He has become one of the biggest champions of coming up with creative solutions to hard problems, particularly around issues of racial justice.

LP: What have you learned from young people through the dialogue process?

SP: Three weeks ago, we brought about 20 young people and 30 adults together for a deep listening process. We spent the day talking about things that mattered. We asked them, “What would make the community stronger? What would make it so that you can do well?” The first thing they said was, “The violence needs to stop.” Second, “We need places to go that are meaningful for us to be in, where we can do things that matter.” And third, “We need the adults to show up.” At the end of the day we asked, “Well, what did you learn today?” And they said, “We learned that there are grownups who care, because they took the time to come here and listen.” It was a very powerful message.

LP: This takes a lot of work. Are you able to build an organization that can sustain this effort or will there always need to be someone like you with enormous energy to hold the center?

SP: I’m not building an organization, I’m building a culture. And in that culture, it doesn’t matter what kind of energy you have, because it’s not about personality; it’s about the values that you’re instituting and building upon. Right now, it means a tremendous amount of work.

On the other hand, I’ve already seen evidence of transference, where people have begun to understand and feel and witness and integrate and begun to run with it. We talked about Police Chief Ed Cronin, who is building a whole systems change initiative within the police department. I don’t have to be there for that. There’s President Asquino, who implemented a systemic change committee at the college as a way to build capacity for organizational problem solving. And there is the Spanish American Center, which has begun to incorporate systems thinking in the way they do business.

These are things that are going to stay around for a long time, and it would be an injustice to pretend that it’s because of me. There is a function, though, about being able to weave relationships and speak to what people care about on lots of different levels. My job is mostly to allow for that space to exist.