Grantee Partner Spotlight: SI CABE

A Q&A with Colleen Springer-Lopez, Yahaira (‘Yaya’) Vargas, and Michelle Soto

Colleen is a co-founder of SI CABE, Yaya is the organization's executive director, and Michelle is an occupational therapist and intern.

SI CABE has an ambitious mission, covers a large geographical area, and is run by unique and passionate individuals. I'm curious to learn how you each arrived at this work.

YAYA: We don’t want to only focus on the negative. We do presentations, in partnership with the Little Resource Center in Carbondale, where we emulate the work they do in prenatal care, but we do it en español. So we do what they do, but we supply the language side. And Miss Soto brings her own knowledge as an occupational therapist to that piece.

"There, you’ve now met the past, present, and future of SI-CABE." -COLLEEN

So, having been around for 14 years now, and with this rich mission, what are the main programs that SI-CABE carries out to further this mission? 

YAYA: So, since we’ve moved away from the school model, in the beginning, we had one community event, and then one event in a school. Now we offer a once-a-month Bilingual Reading Hour, online on Facebook, so that parents can access it when they like. You know – it’s late, and you’re putting kids to bed, and this way you don’t have to drive somewhere for the program. 

We’ve also just reopened the YouTube page and plan to create an entire column where Michelle will work on community health pieces en español. We’ll work with other organizations to get these out to people. It is all a real community effort. I have a master's degree in public administration, so I know how to run things. (Laughs.) Miss Colleen is a maestra. And we have social workers and other areas of expertise represented on our board.

We’ve also created the Latin Summer Nights concert series, now in its 4th year. We started in a small park. Last year, we had to close down an entire street because there were so many people participating. We teamed up with a local business, and the food pantry donated food. So, we were actually able to cook and give away Puerto Rican food, which you generally can’t find down here. We served 154 plates. Technically, we were rained out – it kept raining throughout our event.

COLLEEN: That’s right. We started at 5 p.m. and ran through until 9:00, but in between, a storm rolled in. The same thing had happened the year before, when we had Los Condenados Huastecos; we had rented out the town pavilion, in case it rained, but then it rained and it was like tornadic rain. So then, the Rainbow Café across the street saw us in distress, and said, "Do you want to bring it on over?" 

You’ve just touched on something very interesting; for its size as an organization, SI-CABE partners with an impressive number of other organizations. This includes, increasingly, being in dialogue with elected officials and elected bodies. When it comes to revitalization and economic development, what do you see as unique in what cultural leaders bring to the table?

COLLEEN: I think the uniqueness of it is the audience it draws. Especially if it’s in the public sphere. If it’s downtown, in the grassy knoll, everyone knows they can walk to it, they know they can count on it. There are vendors. It’s the attraction. And folks are open-minded. Who is this new group? Our offerings are different from the local music scene. And people want to check it out. We have a thriving community of creative, multigenerational people. It is the uniqueness of the shared experience. Last year, we tallied 49 organizations partnering on Latin Music Night.

YAYA: What I think we bring to the table is two-fold. We have 14 years of planning experience in doing this. And a lot of our sister organizations are a little younger. So when it comes to others asking "how do I do this, how do I organize this event, or how do I navigate the permits," etc, we are often sought out for our expertise. So we do a lot of mentorship, shoulder-to-shoulder, with a lot of other groups and executive directors that are doing community organizing. They, in turn, share their knowledge with us.

But I think that our biggest role is the one where we bring out the humanities perspective. 

Oftentimes, in small towns, we don’t have a diverse group of people deciding what is brought to the community, presented in the public arena. So I’m grateful to be at the table, to be invited to those tables, I am not scared to speak up, and to say hey, we shouldn’t do that because it might be read this way, or that way. Perhaps we need to pay attention to it, to the culture. Sometimes I’m loved for it, and sometimes hated for it. The labor needs to occur.

COLLEEN: It comes down to access to creative resources in a community. Those are not necessarily monetary; of course, there are costs involved. 

But I think it comes down to access to expressive resources, and then utilizing those to create experiences – create, invoke, plan, execute – experiences from arts and health education.