2020 grantee Bienestar owns and operates twelve affordable multifamily properties in Washington County, creating strong and vibrant communities for more than 500 families. Over the past year, community leader Sandra Martin has navigated mountains of calls and questions, helping Bienestar residents connect with critical resources during the pandemic.
About four years ago, Sandra Martin left her home in Guatemala to follow her husband to the United States. Her husband, a farmworker, found work in a nursery. She’s found opportunities and hope in the United States, but still sometimes struggles with a language barrier that can be frustrating.
Sandra and her husband
Shortly after she immigrated, she and her family moved into a home at Bienestar’s Elm Park apartment property in Forest Grove. These days, she spends most of her time there, working remotely and helping her daughters with their online classes.
Sandra started out as a “Promotora,” one of Bienestar’s community leaders. As the Promotora for Elm Park, she does home visits to her neighbors, checking to see if they need support and connecting them to services and opportunities.
When the COVID pandemic began, everything changed. The Promotores couldn’t meet in person and had to quickly learn to use Zoom and adapt to virtual visits and interactions. Sandra’s connection to the community, her leadership skills, and her skills with technology made her a vital asset in her neighborhood and her community.
In the summer of 2020, Bienestar hired her to be a key part of its COVID response. Thanks to an award from ninety-nine girlfriends, Sandra has stayed on as a crucial part of the Bienestar team and has access to the tools and support she needs to do her job.
Sandra answers Bienestar’s resident hotline, a number that has been distributed to all 620 homes that Bienestar serves. By now she’s used to the wide variety of calls she receives. She helps people who have lost their jobs due to COVID find help paying for rent, utilities, and food. She connects families in quarantine to necessary resources. She knows which organizations are offering rent assistance, which church has food boxes available and when, and is training with Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center staff to help people navigate the vaccine sign-up process.
The hardest calls, she said, are the ones where there’s nothing she can do to help. Sometimes she just has to give callers a number for another organization, and hope that they can find support there. It’s difficult because in many cases, she never finds out what happened to the person in need. The other challenge is the volume of calls that come through the line. If she takes a break from answering, she comes back to “una montaña de mensajes,” a mountain of messages!
Sandra is also an important part of Bienestar’s COVID education and outreach campaign. Salva Vidas, Sé Fuerte / Save Lives, Be Strong, is a bilingual campaign to provide culturally specific information and resources to communities in need. Because she is a Promotora, Sandra is a trusted and known leader in the community. Along with a few of her fellow Promotores, she’s become the face of the Salva Vidas campaign. As a community health worker, she’s been vaccinated, and even took a picture of herself getting the shot to help dispel fears about the vaccine.
When Sandra isn’t answering the hotline or calling up Bienestar residents who are eligible for the vaccine, she likes to watch Netflix with her family. She watches movies in English to improve her language skills, or cartoons with her two daughters. She says she’s adapted to working from home, but she’s looking forward to when she can knock on doors and do home visits in person again.
The award from ninety-nine girlfriends opened up an unexpected path for Sandra, and she’s glad and grateful for the opportunity. Her face lights up as she talks about doing home visits, taking pictures for the Salva Vidas, Sé Fuerte campaign, and yes, even answering a dozen calls a day on the Bienestar hotline. She’s there every day, answering the phone with a smile and supporting her community through this crisis to the other side.
By Sarah Moll, Fund Development and Fiscal Manager, Bienestar