CEO discusses strategic planning and future of Corazón
After a year as CEO, Glaydon de Freitas is reflecting on what he has learned and what comes next for Corazón Healdsburg. His one year anniversary with the nonprofit was on Oct. 26. In unison to his personal celebration, the organization celebrated its 10th year anniversary on the same week as well.
In his first year as CEO, de Freitas has been able to implement new ideas as well as get a perspective of the future he envisions for Corazón.
“It has been a long year, not only for me but for the whole organization. The staff has decided to be more intentional. As soon as I arrived here the staff and the community decided to put together a new strategy,” he said about their new strategic plan for 2021-23.
Holly Fox, director of advocacy and community engagement, said the community has faced hardships such as the recent fires and the COVID-19 pandemic but Corazón was responsive and able to build strong relationships and trust with the community from those hardships.
The organization was then able to go back on those partnerships as it embarked on its strategic planning process.
Instead of a more transactional relationship with the community, it would value a more transformational way of doing programs. A new mindset. In May, Corazón finalized its strategic plan and have been implementing it since then.
De Freitas explained the organization went to the community and conducted surveys and interviews with more than 200 individuals in order to get a better idea of what the community wanted and expected from the organization regarding future change.
The 200 interviews were done by staff members and led by Erica Gutierrez, who de Freitas said called clients in their database. Each interview was around 30 minutes. De Freitas personally interviewed 50 community leaders averaging one to two hours speaking.
“My previous work is in strategic planning and with emphasis in community action, I have always pushed to do it this way. I was successful in convincing the board and staff to do this,” he said.
De Freitas spoke to community leaders who are multigenerational and got some perspective and identified not only community needs but the community’s aspirations.
Based on the answers by the community, their aspirations are based on two objectives.
“The first is the sense of belonging, the community wants to belong to this place. Healdsburg is a community that has grown, and the wealth especially because of wineries and the hospitality industry. But this growth was not translated proportionally to the underserved community. All the policies and the way the city is built and the possibility of generating wealth is not proportionate,” de Freitas said.
“I am not talking about the people who just arrived, if you ask fourth generation Mexican descent people here they still say they do not belong here. They do not go to events in the Plaza, they do not participate in gatherings, a sense of belonging is one aspiration,” he explained.
In de Freitas’ eyes, the cause of this is the effect of multiple causes at the same time. He said the most obvious one being racism, but also housing conditions and crisis, the distribution of labor, childcare for workers and more.
“Not only socioeconomic power but political power. It has been happening for generations,” he said.
The second aspiration is about poverty. He described Healdsburg as a 10,000-person area but 30% of the people have been living in the same condition.
“The community has been stuck in the same place. No social mobility, there is no hope. It is trying to survive. We are having a demographic shift and it is happening fast. The population in the school district is 70% Latinx. We are talking positions in leadership and decision making — we are not seeing this being proportional.”
De Freitas said that this runs the risk of people moving out and leaving the area because it isn’t preparing to receive the population.
When it comes to Corazón’s new strategies, family center coaching is attempting to change its course. Their case management is trying to empower individuals and dignify them instead of directing them.
“We do not want to fix or have the arrogance to fix people’s lives. We want to coach people to be the protagonists of their own change, that was a community demand. We want to let them decide the plan for themselves,” de Freitas said.
As CEO, de Freitas has been able to tell the community has enough resiliency and entrepreneur mindset and creativity to be the protagonists of their own change. Therefore, their case management has now changed.
“We do not want to be the white saviors of the community,” he said.
Besides changing its case management, the organization is helping the City of Healdsburg launch a universal income pilot program in order to bring stability to the city’s most vulnerable population. In a separate component of its new strategic plan, a collective led by Fox will implement a new activism branch which will map and try to identify through community leadership, policies and laws that impede or block the aspirations of the community.
“Our campaign will try to create pressure for decision makers to change this and improve the livelihood of the collective. We are launching a campaign very soon that will talk about policies, racism, housing, labor, education. The demands we are going to present to authorities. But this is not Corazón, (these are) community-led demands through a very strategic community organization. We are just being a vehicle for the change of the community,” de Freitas said.
Because Corazón is also known for celebrating diversity, it will now try to do so not only through cultural demonstrations but also through conversations about diversity and equity. De Freitas said the organization is trying to bring experts through conferences, forums and be very intentional on the two topics.
So far, he described their new strategic plan as successful.
“It is satisfying to work with a community which will be the primary recipients of our work. The community is extremely responsive, they are real partners. It was a surprise the way the community embraced Corazon’s plan,” he said.
De Freitas said there is a difference from previous work he was used to, he said it is more connected to the reality of the community this time around.
“It is much less hypocritical and I mean it. This is an organization that does not have the white savior mentality. We do not want to be one more charity that gives money to people for 30 or 40 years and nothing changes but the community does not appreciate this approach as well,” De Freitas said.
Fox added the team has grown since de Freitas came along, doubling. Corazón now has a total of 26 employees and the majority are bilingual, bicultural and longtime residents of Sonoma County.
“Our staff is of the community we are working with. When I started we were only eight. Corazón has the best team in the whole county — that is why it has been easy for us to create this mindset, everyone has similar roots or origins,” he said.
“There is a lot of ownership in the work that we do,” de Freitas said.
