To see Felix Miranda play guitar is to see a young man in his element. As his fingers fly up and down the fretboard, his right hand alternating between furious strumming and delicate picking, his face conveys deep contemplation, intensity, and joy. The sound pours out of Felix’s guitar, but the music undeniably flows from him.
Felix, now 30, first picked up a guitar when he was nine after seeing a flyer for free lessons at the Roosevelt Townhomes, where he lived in East Salinas. Community Housing Improvement Systems and Planning Association (CHISPA), the nonprofit housing developer that manages the Townhomes, offered the lessons as part of an effort to cultivate a sense of community through educational and recreational opportunities for residents.
Felix describes this as a life-changing event. “When I play guitar,” he says, “that’s when I feel the most free.” At 18, he started teaching lessons through CHISPA, and he’s been sharing the gift of music with other young people ever since.
Stories like Felix’s – young people finding their passion, purpose, and pathway in life – were core to the Packard Foundation’s Salinas Youth Initiative (SYI), a 10-year partnership with 14 community organizations, including CHISPA, to invest in young people in East Salinas. This year marks the end of SYI, and we are looking back to celebrate the initiative’s impact.
Salinas’ Story
Salinas, California is one of the most prolific agricultural producing locations in the country. Home to many farmworkers and their families, Salinas has the highest proportion of Latino residents of any California city.
Agriculture in Salinas is a $2 billion industry, supplying 80% of the country’s lettuce and artichokes. At the same time, economic inequality is pronounced, with home prices soaring, wages stagnating, and the workers and families who literally sow the seeds of Salinas’ economy often left out of reaping its rewards.
Salinas isn’t a new city, but it is a young one. Almost half its residents are younger than 30, and 30% are younger than 19. The complexities of growing up in Salinas can be frustrating for young residents, who beam when they speak about a rich cultural identity – food, music, art, and a strong sense of community – but also clearly see the challenges facing their community.
Young people from Salinas participate in tutoring, music lessons, art classes, sports, mentoring, and civic engagement through the Salinas Youth Initiative between 2014 and 2024.
Salinas Youth Initiative
In 2012, when the Packard Foundation began its coordinated effort to strengthen organizations working to support young people in Salinas, the community was going through a difficult period. Several high-profile instances of violence, gang activity, and friction between the community and law enforcement put a spotlight on the challenges facing Salinas youth.
In developing SYI, we engaged local organizations already working to address these issues. We believed that by investing in and partnering with organizations that had deep relationships with the community, we could help young people in Salinas find their purpose, passion, and pathway. Knowing that the community’s challenges were symptoms of broader inequity and injustice, we also believed that an engaged and thriving youth population in Salinas could drive a more resilient and vibrant future.
Our partners had been deeply engaged in their community through programs such as tutoring, music lessons, art classes, sports academies, mentoring, and civic engagement. We set out to strengthen these organizations and bring them together in a collaborative effort; we envisioned a field of mutually supportive, connected organizations that shared a vision for the future and invested in building a collective voice for young people in Salinas.
More than a decade later, as the initiative ends, we’re honored to celebrate what these partnerships made possible. To help us understand SYI’s impact, we engaged an evaluator, who was a critical part of the program team, to help us learn and adapt throughout the duration of the initiative. Her report, available here, tells the story of the initiative’s design and impact, grounds this work in a rich cultural and historical context, and outlines lessons and insights for the future.
Impact can be hard to quantify for work that, by design, operates on such a personal and individual level. But as SYI ends, we know that its impact is undeniable – evident in the vibrant and collaborative community of youth-serving programs that is poised to continue growing in Salinas. And each personal story reminds us that the most meaningful impact will flow from young leaders invested in deeply engaging in their community.
Lessons Learned
During a decade-long journey, we learned valuable lessons about how best to build stronger relationships with community partners through pursuing the mutual goal of greatest impact. Our evaluation reinforces some key lessons:
Engage Deeply and Respectfully with the Community
There’s no substitute for experience. Local leaders are experts, and building trust with them acknowledges their deep connection to their community and their potential to drive meaningful change. Listening to community perspectives allowed us to see beyond the data and recognize the rich histories and experiences of real people facing complex challenges, which informed our program design on an ongoing basis.
Redefine Relationships and Share Power
Those closest to the issues often hold the solutions. We challenged typical philanthropy power dynamics by fostering true partnerships required us to be humble, open to learning, and willing to share decision-making power. Encouraging honest exchanges and valuing the unique contributions of each partner allowed us and our grantees to make an impact based on mutual respect and a shared vision for the future.
Embrace a Flexible Approach
Lasting social change requires patience and flexibility. There’s no single best approach to supporting grantees and partners, and needs may change as challenges and opportunities arise. Taking the long view of progress enabled us to embrace and learn from grassroots leadership and innovation.
Encouraging experimentation and ongoing learning allowed our partners to evolve their strategies as necessary.
Giving Back, Looking Forward
Reflecting on ten years of partnership in Salinas, my colleagues and I feel immense gratitude. This experience reminds us that when funders are willing to do things differently, and when trust is at the center of true partnerships with communities, a sort of magic can happen.
We are honored to share how our learning has influenced our grantmaking moving forward, and how SYI showed how powerful working authentically and meaningfully with the communities we serve. And we hope these lessons are valuable to other funders seeking to build lasting partnerships.
The true legacy of SYI, of course, will be the young leaders like Felix Miranda who are helping write the next chapter of Salinas’ story.
When Felix talks about teaching music, he lights up. He describes lessons and rehearsals as “like therapy” for both him and his young students. Being able to share his passion with others is “truly a blessing.”
To watch Felix teach guitar is to see a young man doing what he was meant to do. The feeling he gets from teaching, he says, “makes me realize it’s not just a coincidence that I’m doing this. I honestly believe it’s my purpose.”
