Who are the Trusted Advocates? If you're an average White Center-ite the term "Trusted Advocate" may not ring a bell.

But chances are you've met at least one of them and that you're already aware of the work they've been doing here. One of their jobs is to help individuals and families deal with some of the nitty-gritty details of life in America. Another job is to help steer some of the big changes happening right now in the White Center area.

In the big picture though, what they're trying to do is to raise the collective voices of the ethnic communities they represent.

We recently spoke with Theresa Fujiwara and Bob Shimabukuro at the White Center office of Making Connections, a local community development initiative funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Making Connections, along with the Nonprofit Assistance Center and the Refugee Federation, were largely responsible for bringing the Trusted Advocates together as a group.

Fujiwara and Shimabukuro say the Advocates are an informal group of bilingual, bicultural men, women and youth who represent about a dozen ethnic and youth communities of White Center and Boulevard Park in their dealings with local business, government, school boards and nonprofit organizations. There are between 18 and 25 people who act as the core group, providing mentoring, leadership and stability, with another 20 to 30 who may get involved with event organizing, translating and other services as needed.

The Advocates are people whom others in their community turn to when they need help with a family or medical emergency, help dealing with "the system," or just help.

Shimabukuro, who calls himself the "scribe" for the Advocates organization, told about an Iraqi man named Yahya Al-garaib, who is a typical example of an Advocate.

"Yahya immigrated to this area in 1994 and became involved with the Iraqi Community Center. Because he could communicate with local service providers he was able to deliver some things for the local Iraq community and so, over time, he developed as a leader, even though he doesn't think of himself as one."

Some Advocates might specialize in providing translation services for individuals in their community, coming along with their non-English speaking clients on visits to the doctor's office for example, helping fill out Headstart enrollment applications, etc. Others, like Yahya, may be in demand primarily for their negotiating skills or their connections with local business and government.

But how, and why, did so many people from such widely differing ethnic backgrounds come together to form a cohesive group in White Center?

In 2000, Making Connections launched a 10-year project called the Making Connections Initiative, in White Center and Boulevard Park. Shortly afterward, in 2001, the organization hosted a community summit meeting at which residents identified four things as being crucial to White Center and Boulevard Park: schools, housing, employment and safe neighborhoods. Several ethnic community leaders acted as facilitators and interpreters for the nearly 200 ethnic minority people who showed up at this meeting and the facilitator model worked so well that Making Connections decided to expand and formalize it, bringing together the community leaders they had identified during the summit, organizing them into a permanent body and then turning to them as advisors to help guide this and other initiatives.

Since 2001 Making Connections has depended on the Trusted Advocates as a sounding board and partner for these initiatives. The Gates Foundation, King County government, Puget Sound Educational Service District, and other nonprofit and governmental organizations have followed Making Connections' lead in working with the Advocates, which points up the increasing influence ethnic minorities, who now make up slightly more than 50% of the area's population, are exercising in the development of their community.

In November 2006 the Advocates, in partnership with the Puget Sound Educational Service District sponsored a community meeting at Mount View Elementary School to discuss the White Center Early Learning Initiative, a program that aims to ensure that all children are academically and socially ready to enter kindergarten by age five. The meeting was attended by around 500 adults from White Center's ethnic communities and in addition to organizational support the Advocates provided live translation services, led breakout discussion groups and prepared a summary report of the meeting's results. (The report is available online at the Early Learning Initiative's website at http://www.psesd.org/ecfs/wceli.html.) I participated in this community meeting as an observer and was struck by how much the gathering resembled a session of the United Nations, with one person speaking at the podium and hundreds listening to a simultaneous translation piped in over headphones.

There were some 10 different ethnic groups represented at the meeting, and at least as many languages. The participants were asked to answer dozens of multiple-choice questions in rapid-fire succession regarding their preference for their children's early education: everything from, How long have you lived in White Center? to What is your top priority for programs and services for [your] children under 6 years old?

As we looked from the translators reading the questions into the microphones to the parents punching their answers in on their GameBoy-like electronic polling devices, it really brought home to me how essential it was for a group like the Advocates to be involved in an endeavor of this scope.

More recently the Advocates have participated in organizing and leading the White Center Neighborhood Action Plan in partnership with the White Center Community Development Association, which held its "kick off" meeting last November, as well as a follow-up in February of this year. Both events were well attended by the minority community, and both events produced a wealth of relevant feedback from local residents, thanks in part to the Advocates' involvement.

Although each Advocate sees themselves as a representative of the White Center community as a whole they also see their jobs as looking after the special needs of their own ethnic community. Sili Savusa, an advocate for the Samoan and Pacific Islander community, told me that as a Samoan, her job as an Advocate is to make sure that Making Connections and others take the special needs of the Samoan community into account. "It's important for people working with the Samoan community to understand that the needs of Samoans may differ from the immigrant/refugee communities. For example, English education (ESL) is not a big priority for us, since most Samoans here speak English as a first language. But we still have issues that are different from the mainstream White community, and those issues need special attention when plans are being made, especially around education. Samoan high school kids have a high dropout rate for example, and that's a special need we have to address when allocating education resources. The most important thing to me though, is family --so whenever a new policy is being proposed or money is being spent, I always ask myself 'Is this good for our families?'"

Savusa, when telling me about how the Advocates came into being, explained that although the Advocates are basically a creation of Making Connections, the relationship between the two groups isn't always warm and fuzzy. "Making Connections sometimes outpaces us and we have to slow them down," she told me. "They have their timeline for getting their work done, and we have ours. And sometimes that causes friction. They push us to get things decided on a schedule and sometimes we have to push back, telling them, that's just not how we decide things in this group. And that can cause frustration."

She also notes that the language used by Making Connections in some of their documents is official-sounding and not suited to a group of folks who don't speak English as a first language and make decisions by consensus. "The 'push back' and moments of frustration give us the opportunity to inform, educate and develop relationships with Making Connections," Savusa says. "That's the way we learn from each other."

Making Connections' Fujiwara acknowledges that the Trusted Advocates have their own way of doing things, which reflects the way they became leaders in the first place: by slowly and patiently building consensus. "I remember one time some members wanted to open a meeting with a prayer," she told me. "It was going to be led by an Advocate who's a minister at a local church. That was fine with some folks. But the Somalis, who are Muslim, didn't feel right about participating in what they felt would be an explicitly Christian ceremony. What followed was 45 minutes of discussion among the group," she recalls, smiling, "but in the end everybody agreed to the format for an official welcoming ceremony, and it was done in a very respectful manner." Fujiwara also stresses that the Advocates are an organic part of the White Center / Boulevard Park communities, and not merely a creation of Making Connections. "When people see Sili and I working together they assume that Sili is my boss, and not the other way around," she chuckles. "This is a very democratic group of people. Not hierarchical at all. In my career I've worked with many groups and sometimes, when individuals in those groups get a sense of their own power, it undermines their commitment to the good of the whole. But you don't see that with the Advocates. They are very value-driven and stay focused on results and the good of the whole. There's no self-interest at work here because whenever that arises the group itself puts a check on it. People in this group hold each other accountable and will definitely call each other on their stuff."

I asked Fujiwara about her favorite memories of working with the group. After reflecting for several moments she said, "I remember, in the early days of the group, seeing a young Cambodian woman named Sophorn at the meetings. She was always so quiet... I knew she was someone who was looked up to by the Cambodian community but you'd never have known it from how deferential she was in meetings. But gradually that changed, as she grew more confident as a result of her participation in the Making Connections training sessions. Then one day, when we were going through the difficult process of organizing a community summit, Sophorn just stood up out of her chair and demanded: 'What result do we want out of this?' It was funny, to see how outgoing she'd become in such a short time as a result of being an Advocate... This group makes me laugh and makes me cry. But most of all, it makes me humble."

Can Trusted Advocates be fired? "No," says Savusa. "They're basically volunteers. Many of them have full-time jobs. And they work for the community anyway, not for Making Connections." Are they paid? "They can be paid a stipend from the Making Connections' budget for things like interpreting at a community meeting, or translating information on a flier for a community event, or attending a planning meeting with a partner organization, but most of the things they do around community organizing are unpaid and they'd probably do them on their own anyway. But with Making Connections they can have more of an impact, because they are bringing attention to the priorities of the community while elevating the voice of community."

Making Connections has committed to working with the Trusted Advocates and the White Center / Boulevard Park community for another five years, but may extend their commitment for a few years beyond that, depending on how far along the process of transferring the initiative to the local community is by that time. Fujiwara says that the Advocates are already well on their way to becoming totally independent of Making Connections.

"The group needs to develop a more permanent structure and to develop a plan for training new people and bringing them into the organization." But the biggest remaining challenge, she says, is not for the Trusted Advocates themselves but rather for the local institutions they work with, some of whom may need nudging before they recognize the Advocates as an authentic representative of the community.

"The Advocates have their own agenda now," she says, "and [when Making Connections is gone] they'll have to carry that forward on their own. Sili likes to talk about something called the "new normal" for the White Center area. The new normal will be achieved when the boards and institutions that make decisions for this community actually look like the communities they are making the decisions for."

Ultimately, the Trusted Advocates are expected to stand on their own, and that's a concern for Savusa. "Maybe the Advocates will go away when Making Connections does. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. If the resident engagement we've been building here is permanent, and ethnic minorities in White Center develop a habit of working with institutions, non-profit organizations, and building relationships based on trust, then the group will have served its purpose. In any case, if the Trusted Advocates remain then we will probably broaden the group to ensure that it represents the whole community, not just minorities. As our work evolves, so does the group, and that's been pretty amazing to watch!"

You may contact David Preston at preston.david@comcast.net. You can find out more about the Trusted Advocates from Sili Savusa at 937-7680.