PPEP marks 50 years of helping rural Arizonans improve quality of life
PPEP has come a long way since John Arnold, founder of the nonprofit agency, climbed aboard a used school bus that he named “La Tortuga” — the tortoise — beginning in 1967.
It was in that bus Arnold traveled to the fields around Tucson with goal of providing what he described as practical life skills to farmworkers who had come to the United States from Mexico to work as part of the Bracero program.
The 1957 Chevrolet bus, in essence, served as a mobile classroom for Arnold’s organization – Portable Practical Education Preparation, or PPEP – to teach skills aimed at helping the workers to integrate into U.S. society.
La Tortuga has long since been retired and is now on display at the Farmworker Hall of Fame that PPEP maintains in Tucson. But PPEP has continued to grow over the years, offering educational, job training and other services not only to farmworkers but disadvantaged people in rural areas around Arizona.
Among the programs it offers in Yuma County are the two charters school it operates, one in Somerton and one in San Luis; a General Educational Diploma, or GED, program for high school dropouts and a microlending program that provides startup financing for aspiring entrepreneurs.
All of PPEP’s programs are offered with a fundamental goal in mind, Arnold said, helping rural Arizonans to improve their quality of life.
“We do whatever we can to help people help themselves,” said Arnold, who continues today to serve as chief executive officer of PPEP. “The key is self-sufficiency.”
PPEP is marking its 50th anniversary at the Tucson Convention Center, in the city where it was founded and where it continues to have its headquarters.
In reality, La Tortuga was an extension of what Arnold had been doing in his youth when, beginning at 12, he served as an interpreter for a church bus that traveled to the fields near Tucson to minister to the workers. Arnold, who had spent part of his childhood in Mexico and was fluent in Spanish, later drove a church bus of his own and became an ordained pastor at First Southern Baptist Church in Catalina, Ariz.
In 1967, while working in the Head Start program in Tucson, Arnold applied for and received a $19,000 grant from the Tucson War on Poverty program. The money went to purchase the 48-seat La Tortuga, which previously saw service in Florida transporting school children.
Serving as a driver and mechanic for La Tortuga, as well as a teacher, Arnold traveled to the fields to teach lessons in other household finances and other skills aimed at giving farm workers practical skills the needed to survive. The organization he founded and named Portable Practical Education Preparation also recruited Tucson teachers to serve as volunteers teaching literacy skills.
Thanks to partnerships with both nonprofit and for-profit organizations, educational institutions and government agencies, PPEP has been able to expand its reach and its programs, said Arnold.
In the late 1970s it began serving farm workers in San Luis, Ariz., and in the 1980s it began offering a microlending program in Yuma County to help aspiring entrepreneurs. In the 1990s it opened charters schools in Somerton and San Luis, and in partnership with the nationwide YouthBuild program, PPEP offers classes toward GED high school equivalency certificates and vocational training for teens and young adults who didn’t finish school.