By Ivanna Berrios
The University of Pennsylvania hosts a wide array of opportunities for students to engage in community service, whether it be through tutoring programs, volunteering at a local organization, or enrolling in Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) courses. However, the Escuelita Oscar Romero offers a departure from this university mediated model. The Escuelita is an after-school tutoring program and daycamp operating out of the church La Vida Verdadera in Southwest Philadelphia. Founded and led by community organizers, funded through donations, and working closely with volunteers from the Philadelphia Liberation Center in Kensington, the Escuelita Oscar Romero’s values of solidarity, people power, and grassroots organizing distinguish it as a radical alternative to the institutionalized volunteer programs students are accustomed to.
The Escuelita has no official ties to Penn, but has been supported by student volunteers since the summer of 2019. It began in January of 2019 when a local community organizer reached out to a social worker volunteering with the Philadelphia Liberation Center with the idea for a tutoring program. At first, the program had only two tutors: the social worker and her friend Erik Vargas, a senior in the College who also volunteers with the Liberation Center. “Initially it was just me and her going to tutor children, and that became unsustainable, so I reached out to a few friends on campus and they were able to spread the word,” Vargas said.
He also reached out to students through Latinx-interest groups at Penn. Southwest Philadelphia has a large immigrant population, and the children who the Escuelita had begun tutoring were primarily recently arrived Central American children between the ages of 6 and 10. Although students from all backgrounds came to volunteer, a large portion of them came to the Escuelita through Istmo y Vos, the Central-American group at Penn. “They relate a lot to the kids,” said Vargas. This ability to culturally and socioeconomically relate has been proven to boost the likelihood of successful trust-building between volunteers and community members according to a 2019 study by Molly Clever and Karen Miller.
Andy Perez, a sophomore in the College and a member of Istmo y Vos, volunteered with the Escuelita over the summer and found a shared history with the kids he was working with. “It really hit me in my heart at one point when I realized I remember being a kid, being in some church basement while my parents were at work. It reminded me a lot of my childhood, and of my family,” Perez said. “These are kids that look like me, look like my cousins. Any one of them could have easily been my little brother, cousin, or sister.”
As recently arrived, undocumented immigrants, many of the children and their families are vulnerable to harassment and raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. Although ICE deportations and criminalization of undocumented immigrants were already established and rampant under the Obama administration, Donald Trump’s commitment to escalating ICE raids have pushed immigration defense and anti-ICE action to the forefront of recent political discourse the past couple of years. More recently, this past summer of 2019 the state sanctioned mission to break apart immigrant families accelerated and the Department of Homeland Security released two reports on the horrific conditions of immigrant detention centers. This was part of the reason why supporting the community and getting involved with the Escuelita was so pressing and important to students, says Vargas.
“People were very interested. I think this was when the concentration camps at the border were being talked about more in the mainstream, and so people were really looking for something to do,” said Vargas.
During this period of increased interest and support, the Escuelita expanded from two dedicated tutors to a comprehensive summer camp with at least two unpaid volunteers at the church every day, Monday through Friday. Through connections with a local grocery store, the Escuelita was also able to receive periodic food donations and set up a food pantry for the community. Through other organic organizing connections, the Escuelita also began hosting a few clothing drives. After finding out that a volunteer with the Escuelita had a friend who worked at a wildlife refuge in Southwest, the Escuelita was even able to organize a field trip with the kids to the refuge. “The kids don’t necessarily get to go camping and hiking that often. It was nice to be out in nature, and it was very educational for them,” said Vargas.
Now, the Escuelita has shifted from a full scale day camp back to the after-school tutoring program it began as, but with many more volunteers, support, and partnerships. Inspired by their success with the Escuelita and the knowledge that there is more work to be done, volunteers with the Liberation Center also began building a deportation defense network element. After a case of an Escuelita community member being detained by ICE, Vargas and others began doing outreach with more people in the community to see how neighbors could show up for neighbors by alerting others of ICE presence in the neighborhood, obstructing a raid, and more.
The Escuelita’s approach to their program is community centered, focusing on creating genuine connections and encouraging volunteers to not see themselves as entirely separate from the people they’re working with. “We’re not doing this for the purpose of ‘giving to the community,’ the way Penn typically phrases their programs even though Penn is a big cause as to why philly schools are underfunded. Ultimately, we’re building with the community and steadily building our own methods of taking care of ourselves and gaining people power. This is just one method and we’re branching out from that,” said Vargas.
It’s important for students to support programs like the Escuelita not only because they are free from the restraints and conditions the university imposes, but also because their grassroots status makes them particularly vulnerable to underfunding, burning out of volunteers and other problems that typically face independent, small-scale programs. The Escuelita is a way for students at Penn, particularly lower-income and Latinx students, to engage in meaningful relationship-building that sees the community as peers. Perez noted that the many of Penn’s tutoring and volunteer programs aiming to help Philadelphia’s “inner city youth” had majority white volunteers and leadership, and that “They weren’t taking it seriously. It’s a reminder of how politics for white people is just fun and games.” The Escuelita seeks to go beyond this patronizing, detached approach by acknowledging that our struggles are connected and working towards collective resource building. As Vargas phrased it, “it’s not charity, it’s solidarity.”
To provide support for Escuelita Oscar Romero, visit their GoFundMe.
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