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20 making a difference: Activism

In many ways, making a difference is bred into Camila Chávez.

As a child, she saw firsthand the efforts and the impact made by her tio, the late Cesar Chávez, founder of the United Farmworkers Union.

She watched as her mother and UFW co-founder, Dolores Huerta, stood solid in her fight for a better life for farmworkers and equality for women.

And, perhaps most importantly, while growing up at La Paz — home of the UFW — Chávez learned that when people band together, anything is possible.

Today, the 30-year-old is the co-founder and executive director of the Dolores Huerta Foundation (DHF).

From the group’s headquarters in Bakersfield, Chávez oversees training for low-income community members in the areas of leadership and organizing skills, specific to civic and electoral participation — giving them a way to make their own changes in their own communities.

“Our mission is to help others identify their needs and help them come up with the solutions to those needs,” said Chávez, who graduated from Mills College in Oakland.

By teaching people to become their own advocates in their own communities, the foundation is establishing long-term solutions, according to Chávez.

“They can’t just wait for someone from the outside — it’s up to them to organize themselves and be able to prioritize the issues that need to be addressed,” she said.

As such, Chávez travels throughout California with her passion for working to achieve social justice — all the while remembering well the ideals of non-violence, selfless motivation and personal responsibility instilled in her by her parents, Huerta and Richard Chávez.

The differences others made for her, Camila Chávez passes on as her way of making a difference.

At times, she’s called upon to relay her family’s historical past because not everyone knows the history of the Chávez legacy, she said.

“With such a large immigrant community and people always coming here new to the area, they don’t always know about Cesar Chávez and what was the farmworkers movement,” Chávez said. “I use that example to show them that back in the day when there was no water and no toilets in the fields, we got together and made that change.

“On a community level, we can do the same thing — one person is one person, many people coming together is a way to make a change.”

For Chávez, those community-level changes may be more along the lines of new sidewalks, more recreational facilities for young people, health insurance and better access to health care, educational issues, economical issues — the list goes on and on ... but so do the efforts.