SEASON FOR SHARING
Program inspires students
The Aguila Youth Leadership Institute was among the 162 agencies aided by The Arizona Republic’s Season for Sharing campaign last year, receiving a grant that went to preparing students for college, career and life. See how this organization inspires.
Only because her mom made her, Nadia Grajeda was sitting in the classroom on a weekend and half-listening to someone tell students something about goals and graduating.
“Why do I want to sit in school all day listening to someone talk and then spend all day Saturday listening to someone lecture me?” she says remembering that day six years ago near the start of her Freshman year in high school.
Now it’s almost Christmas, and Nadia, 20, is thinking back, sitting at her parent’s dining room table within arm’s reach of her mother.
School was her big brother’s thing. He was the academic, the kid who actually liked learning about history and would rather be inside reading books than outside playing sports. Nadia liked being on the field. In her view, her time was split between seasons — volleyball and softball.
Her mom, Cindy, was a star softball player in high school and Nadia took after her mom. They both have soft brown eyes, big smiles and a stubborn streak.
Cindy was a teenager when she dropped out of high school. She wasn’t ready to give up on her education or softball or her dreams. But she had to make a choice.
“I got pregnant,” she says, staring hard at her hands and then harder at her daughter. “I chose her dad and we had a baby.”
They named their baby boy Andre. Cindy and her husband have dreamed of their children applying to colleges, celebrating when the acceptance letter came, and crying when they watched their babies walk across a stage for a piece of paper that meant they’d earned an education and a bachelor’s degree.
When Andre was in high school, Cindy heard about a program called the Aguila Leadership Youth Institute. The small non-profit in Phoenix was described as more than a college-prep
“We invite students and their parents to be a part of our Aguila family.
We want to change the world . ... We talk about the education of the mind and the heart that Cesar Chavez talked about.”
Rosemary Ybarra-Hernandez Aguila co-founder
program.
Aguila’s approach to educating kids — whose parents may have not gone to college or are immigrants or from other marginalized communities — is as much about cultural understanding, civic engagement, social justice, service-learning, building a community and resiliency as it is about academics.
Aguila is among the 162 agencies aided by The Arizona Republic’s Season for Sharing campaign last year, receiving a $10,000 grant that went to preparing students for college, career and life.
The organization, co-founded by Rosemary Ybarra-Hernandez and her husband Robert Hernandez, or Mrs. H and Mr. H to the kids, relies on peer-topeer learning, lifelong mentorship and engaging parents in their student’s path from high school to college.
The mission appealed to Cindy, a mom worried her children would soon be old enough to make choices with lifelong consequences that could derail their dreams. Andre didn’t fight her when she wanted him to join the Aguila program.
“He loved it … and I drank the KoolAid,” she says, laughing. “I told Mrs. H, ‘You got me. I’m in this forever.’ ”
But as Nadia sat in the classroom that first day six years ago, just a few years younger than her mother when she dropped out of high school, she only wanted out.
They made a deal.
“I asked her to give it a chance ... take a few classes,” Cindy says.
Nadia didn’t know then that taking a chance on Aguila would soon help her make her own choices, even one chance so big she’d be willing to give up on a dream.
‘They really wanted more for us’
Rosemary Ybarra-Hernandez and her husband founded Aguila in 2004. But it started generations ago when her mom met her dad.
“My mother didn’t go to high school but she was self-taught, she read a lot,” she says. “My daddy didn’t graduate from eighth grade because he didn’t have shoes to wear to school.”
Rosemary says her dad worked for the Phoenix sanitation department, until a work injury cost him his job.
“We were in poverty,” she says. “My mom had to start cleaning offices. I was in fifth grade, cleaning offices with her.
My daddy and my mommy, they really wanted more for us.”
She remembers the day her dad loaded his two daughters in the car, driving them west to an onion field in Surprise. He wanted them to see that they had a chance to escape the fields that many Mexicans worked in for a living, but that their future would depend on their own choices.
Rosemary can still hear her dad’s voice.
“My daddy said, ‘Look at these people. They have to be here. You get to go home. They have to provide for their families. When you go to college you need to remember your people. We need to make our lives better, but in the process, help make other’s lives better,’ ” she says.
Rosemary’s sister Gloria would graduate from Harvard Law School and become the first Latina judge in Arizona. Rosemary would earn her doctorate from Arizona State University. She studied juvenile justice policy and focused on youth violence, researching Latino youth and gang members.
Rosemary wanted more for these kids. She sat around a dinner table in 2000 with other Latino community leaders, brainstorming and sowing the seeds of a program.
They settled on what Rosemary calls a holistic approach that helps children see their history as a strength, their culture as a point of pride and their role in making choices to build a better future for themselves and others.
“We invite students and their parents to be a part of our Aguila family,” she says. “We want to change the world . ... We talk about the education of the mind and the heart that Cesar Chavez talked about.”
The small non-profit counts on donations from the community and grants from companies and foundations, including Season for Sharing, to keep the program alive. And with each year, their family of what Rosemary calls her “Aguilitas,” little Eagles, would grow.
Aguila nest: ‘We pay it forward’
Tired of seeing the organization have to move each time a lease ended, an Aguila board member gifted Aguila a little brick building in Phoenix. Aguilitas and their families call it the nest.
On a chilly day in December, Monica Avila, the organization’s program manager, is working with two Aguila graduates who now mentor younger students.
Maria Hernandez, 21, started with Aguila in high school. Now, she’s finish
ing a degree at Arizona State University in urban and metropolitan studies with an emphasis on social change.
Analyssa Flores, 19, says Aguila helped her and her family understand the skills she needed to achieve higher education. She earned a scholarship to attend Grand Canyon University and is studying education.
“Being a first-generation student, I always knew I wanted to go to college to make my parent’s sacrifices being in this country worth it,” she says.
On any given day, Aguilitas will stop by to help.
A while later, Michel Contreras, 25, walks in. He was an Aguilita in high school and graduated from New Mexico State University. Now, he works at the Maricopa Community College District Office but still helps run Aguila’s website.
“Like Mrs. H always says, ‘We pay it forward,’ ” he says.
An Aguilita graduates, gives back
In December, it’s cold enough in the desert that children at Cesar Chavez Leadership Academy, a Pre-K-8 school in South Phoenix, are wearing hoodies and jeans.
Maria and Analyssa are teaching children the difference between a job and a dream career. One child wants to be a police officer to take care of people. Bethzy Bautista, a little girl with thick black hair and chunky black eyeglasses, asks a question so softly it’s hard to hear. Analyssa gently encourages her to speak up.
“What do you call it when people stand up for people’s rights?” she asks. “Like Cesar Chavez,” another little girl chimes in.
“A civil rights activist,” Analyssa says.
“The career I want to have is civil rights activist because I want to be an inspiration to the community, kids and to the people that feel that they are discriminated (against) every day in their life,” Bethzy says raising her hand to her mouth and holding back tears.
The class claps for Bethzy. Maria wants the kids to know she gets it.
“I was where you are sitting now,” she says. “Aguila helped me find my voice. College just prepares you for the world and we’re here to prepare you for college so when you get there you are not alone, we’re here with you.”
Monica shouts from across the room. “And guess what guys? She graduates Monday from ASU.”
The classroom erupts in whoops and cheers.
‘I made choice right for me’
Nadia looks at her mom as she remembers her path from fighting being in Aguila to now.
“I became a part of the Aguila family,” she says. “My parents supported me but they didn’t go to college.”
Aguila mentors got to know the kids and walked them through filling out scholarship and applications. By Nadia’s senior year, she still wasn’t sure what college she wanted to attend.
Then her class heard about a program at GCU that offered students a chance to earn a scholarship that would pay for their full tuition. To qualify Students Inspiring Students scholarship, teens needed to log 100 hours of tutoring at GCU’s learning center.
Nadia and her friends figured they had nothing to lose, though they’d be starting months after others going after the scholarship had. Nadia didn’t even tell her parents what she was doing.
As her hours started to grow, Nadia started to take the opportunity seriously. But then softball season started. She’d played club softball, and had been a captain on her high school team, but all her work led up to her varsity year.
Nadia asked her coach if she could please be a little late to practice on some days when she was putting in the last of her 100 hours. She was so close.
Nadia says her coach told her she had to make a choice: Softball or the scholarship.
Nadia decided to talk to her parents. Cindy remembered how she gave up her varsity year of softball and dropped out of high school when she got pregnant.
“You want your kids to have what you didn’t and she’d worked so hard at softball,” Cindy says. But Cindy knew from Aguila classes what it takes to get into college, pay for it and graduate.
Still, Cindy and her husband knew this was a choice her daughter had to make on her own. “I told her to think about what she wanted for her future and what would help her get there,” she says.
Cindy prayed and waited. Nadia made up her mind. She packed her softball uniform, headed to school and turned it into her coach.
“I made the choice that was right for me,” she says. “I’d seen with Aguila that you have to surround yourself with people who want you to succeed and you have to make sacrifices to make your dreams happen.”
‘Everything coming full circle’
Nadia finished 100 hours at GCU’s learning center on the last day of the deadline.
And on a sunny spring day in 2017, a counselor called Nadia to the library. When she got there, she was with other students who had chosen to spend months at GCU for a chance.
“They read my friend’s name and told her she got the scholarship,” Nadia says. “I was really nervous.”
Then, someone called Nadia’s name. “I couldn’t believe it,” she says. Cindy is crying at the dinner table.
“It’s very fulfilling, just everything coming full circle,” Cindy says, pausing to get the words out and catching her breath as her eyes fill with tears. “Aguila telling you your kids can do it, for us to actually almost being there, it’s great. I mean we were young parents and… We’re so proud of our kids.”
Nadia rests her hand on her mother’s arm.
“I tell her all this big news and you know, my dreams,” she says. “I’m very grateful for having her and my parents both there telling me that I can do this and I will do it. And I have done it.”
Nadia reaches for her mother. Cindy squeezes her little girl’s hand tight. A few days later, the family will travel to San Antonio. They’ll see what can happen when you become an Aguilita and join Aguila’s so-called CIA, comadres in action.
They will watch Andre, in his cap and gown, walk across the stage for a piece a paper. Years ago, when they dreamed of this moment, they thought it was about earning an education and a bachelor’s degree. Now they know that Aguilitas are only getting started after graduation. Now, they’re part of an Aguilita family that remembers their people and pays it forward.
It’s late. Nadia’s tired. She spent the morning studying for finals and the afternoon tutoring school children learning English, but not before making a stop.
Inside the little red Aguila house, the nest, she visited with other Aguilitas. They’re planning a college fair for high school students. Nadia always keeps an eye out for the kids who would rather not be there, so she can say she felt the same but gave it a chance.