Peruvian Immigrant Finds a Better Life, and Nonprofit Career, in California

I was born in Lima, Peru, and was the eldest of four children. My father was a taxi driver and my mother was a stay-at-home mom. I always knew that I was going to come to the United States — I had an uncle in Miami and an aunt in California — to get a job so I could send money back to my family.

In 1995 I arrived in Miami — I was undocumented until 2001 — and lived with my uncle, who was a landscaper, and my aunt, who owned a cleaning business.

LAURA PEREZ Age: 32 First job: Nanny and housekeeper, Miami Current job: Executive director, Street Level Health Project, Oakland, Calif.

At first I worked with my aunt cleaning houses, but then she found me a job with a family who needed a nanny. For $150 a week I was taking care of three children, doing the cleaning and cooking, as well as watching the dogs when the family went on vacation. Then I went to work for a divorced woman with two small children and stayed with this family for almost two years.

In 1999 my California aunt invited me to come live with her. I knew that I wanted to do something more with my life than just cleaning houses and taking care of other people’s children, so I moved to Oakland, which felt much more like home than Miami. And in California I was able to take English-language classes, even though I wasn’t documented.

My aunt worked in the Women’s Choice Clinic, a community-based obstetrics-gynecology clinic, and asked me if I wanted to volunteer there. This was a completely new experience for me. I knew nothing about feminism or activism. For the first time, I saw how powerful women could be, and I really loved this new world. In Peru women clean, cook, and take care of the children.

Then the clinic offered me a part-time job doing data entry and translating materials into Spanish. I became more and more involved and learned how to draw blood, take a patient’s blood pressure, and explain to Hispanic women how the system worked. In 2001 I became the clinic coordinator on a full-time basis. I supervised the medical assistants and medical-records staff and oversaw patient referrals and follow-up.

Around 2002 I was volunteering at the University of California at San Francisco’s Community Occupational Health Project (which was based in Oakland and has since closed), where I helped with translation. Subsequently, in 2003, UCSF offered me the position of clinic and outreach coordinator for the project. I was responsible for weekly occupational-health clinics and screening clinics for low-wage workers in the San Francisco Bay area.

A COHP friend of mine was on the board of the very, very new Street Level Health Project, which connects uninsured and low-wage day laborers to health and social services, and asked me to become a board member. When Street Level was beginning, five years ago, we really didn’t have a lot of money and were working to register as a charity with the Internal Revenue Service.

In September 2005, I became the part-time executive director of Street Level as a result of the California Wellness Foundation donating money to the Oakland Worker Center, which in turn contracted with Street Level to do more screenings for high blood pressure, diabetes, and to address other health problems. We were now able to hire a doctor to screen people for eight hours a week and point them to where they could get follow-up care.

Then, when the Community Occupational Health Project closed in 2006, Street Level knew we really had to pick up some of the slack.

In the beginning, we really spent a lot of time on the street — nurses and doctors volunteered with students from Mills College to do screening of our patients, many of whom were homeless. Our volunteers pretty much screen people for diseases such as heart disease and diabetes and then refer them to the organizations that are able to help them.

When our patients come here, they may need things other than just medical care. Our volunteers do an intake interview and find out if they need food, a job, an attorney, English-as-a-second-language classes, and so on. After they leave the clinic, we keep track of them to make sure they have housing, shelter, and food.

We aggressively reach out to uninsured and low-wage day laborers. We receive in-kind donations and have people on staff who speak Mam, Mandarin, Mongolian, and other languages. We have a twice-weekly free health clinic, a community mental-health program, a food-distribution program, and a film-discussion group.

In 2006 we raised enough money so that I could become the full-time executive director, but until 2007, I was the only paid employee — we really relied on volunteers, and still do.

Today we have a budget of $500,000, which includes money from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Getting that grant really opened a lot of doors for us, along with the good publicity we got as a result of it.

When I came to this country, I had no idea about how nonprofits worked or how to navigate the system. But I’ve learned.

When I first arrived in California, my life really wasn’t working. But God was always there for me, and I realized how easy my life was compared to some of our clients who have no family and no place to sleep. My journey is helping people and listening to them as well as learning from them.

Street Level has been growing, but if we grow too fast, we will no longer be a grass-roots program. We are very close to our clients, and I don’t want to lose that closeness.

What I really want to do is to share what we have learned with others. I’d like to take our model and help other groups to benefit from what I have learned. If something happens to me, I want everyone else to have all the skills and tools they need to keep this program going.