Q&A With California Leaders: Sona Grover on Supporting Immigrant Families in Silicon Valley
How one organization is partnering with local educators, schools, and community organizations to provide wrap around services and training for caregivers
Blog Post
May 2, 2024
Sona Grover works with families of young children in East San Jose, California. Families here often work two and three jobs to make ends meet. While they are at work, it is often aunties, grandmas and older siblings who are caring for the communities’ youngest children.
Here’s how her organization, Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County, is partnering with local educators, schools and community organizations to provide wrap around services and training for these caregivers to make sure children are healthy and ready for school.
Who are the families you work with in San Jose and how are they doing in this moment?
The neighborhoods we work in in San Jose are heavily populated with immigrant families. They come from Mexico, Central and South America and Vietnam. Most do not have the means to access formal childcare for their kiddos. Families here need the basics: food, clothing, shelter, immigration and naturalization services. They're also looking for employment assistance and help with housing.
Tell us about the Family Resource Centers. Why are they critical for families in your area?
We run family resource centers to serve families with children 0 to 5 and aim for a “No Wrong Door” approach. That is, a family may come in for a music or movement class, but the interaction with that family doesn’t end there. We do further assessments to determine what their needs are. So, if it’s food, we have the food resources, same with immigration, housing or rental assistance.
Many of the people who work in our family resource centers have long relationships in the community, which helps to build trust. The family resource centers are a family friendly space within their neighborhood that is approachable and accessible. One is located in the local Educare and three are located on elementary school campuses. They are also sanctuary centers. We don’t, for example, ask for details like income or social security numbers before giving out services.
Why is it particularly important to give support to family friends and neighbor caregivers (FFNs) in your community and how do you go about doing that?
Families here are working to make ends meet, they're working two to three jobs. So maybe it’s the grandparent or elder sister or brother who are attending college and taking care of their younger siblings. We welcome all of these FFN caregivers in our program. Each year, we have a new cohort of caregivers who take part in a training program that runs from November through June. Each cohort takes part in 21 professional development hours, where we provide training in child development, language and literacy, social emotional learning and more.
How are you reaching out to families?
It’s a combination of knock and talk and posting on Parent’s Square in the local Franklin McKinley School District. Families already know us in these neighborhoods. We make use of those networks and relationships with partners like the Santee Neighborhood Association, the City of San Jose, and local school principals and school liaisons. Initially it was very difficult to recruit, but now we have 35 to 60 FFNs enrolled each year.
What works to encourage people to join?
We hire from the community. Most of our team members were volunteers first, so they are familiar within the neighborhood and the staff, which again, creates a bridge and an easy trust between families to come in to ask for resources.
Also, all of our services are presented in three languages: English, Spanish, and Vietnamese and right now, I would say the FFN program is 90 percent on Zoom.
Is that a change since the pandemic?
Yes, in the pandemic we had small call-in sessions on how to create your Gmail account, how to log into Zoom, how to just change the interpretation on the Zoom platform. We also provided devices to caregivers.Today we provide a digital literacy program which helps with things as simple as how to read the email sent by a teacher, how to sign up for conferences, or how to check your child's scores if they have been posted to online platforms.
What impact have you seen?
The FFN training helps build a web of care around families. When FFNs are taking these professional development workshops, they're also getting support. If you have a child in your care and notice that they might need additional support in their development or if there is any developmental delay, then they can connect to our family resource centers. One of the community workers could do an assessment and then may refer the children to further services or to the school district.
It's very important that every individual who is in the care network of a child works together to uplift them. We cannot uplift children alone, we need each other's hands in support.
Sona Grover is the program manager at the Children’s Initiative at Franklin McKinley School District with Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County. This work is part of a ten-year initiative to reform how early childhood systems work and teachers are trained in San Jose, Oakland, and Fresno, California. You can read more about that work here.