Resident Helps Low-Income Families Follow Their Dreams

Everyday Inspirations is a series that features people in Patch communities who inspire others through their work, or people who have faced extraordinary situations and grown from them. They have been featured by other people in the community that have been inspired by the nominees.

Name: Alicia de la Cruz
Town: Highland Park, IL
Nominated by: Laura Distelheim

Why is this person an "Everyday Inspiration?" 
Alicia de la Cruz is a woman who deals in dreams. A fair housing advocate by profession, she has long been concerned about the ability of low-income immigrant children living hidden in the shadow of affluence in her community – Highland Park and Highwood, Illinois – to pursue their dreams.

While those children have always had exactly the same dreams as do the children they sit beside in school every day, they have never had the same opportunities to pursue them. It is a community rich in dance and music and art and athletics programs for children whose families can afford their tuition. For those whose parents are waging a daily battle for economic survival, however, such opportunities have always been out of reach.

Alicia, a Mexican immigrant herself, refused to accept that. In 2009, fueled by her dedication to these families, her determination to make a difference, and her vision of what she believed to be possible, she joined with a local emergency services organization, Neighbor to Neighbor, to create a pilot program – Dancer to Dancer – for which she recruited two volunteers to teach ballet every Saturday morning in the high school’s dance studio to thirty-five little girls who had been begging their parents for the chance to learn how to dance.

You had only to look at the light in those little girls’ eyes to understand that that program was an unmitigated success. You had only to look at the light in Alicia’s eyes to understand that it was also just a beginning. From the seed of that pilot program, she has since grown an entire organization – Working Together – which currently offers not only ballet, but also folkloric dance, art, guitar, yoga, Tae Kwon Do, jewelry making, sewing, knitting and English classes for both children and adults, and which is continually adding new classes to its roster, as more and more volunteers step forward to offer whatever skills they can to help make her vision a reality.

Even more important than the skills these families are learning in those classes, however, is the message they are receiving: They matter. Their dreams matter. What they have to offer this world matters. Working Together has given them a way to step not only out of the shadows, but into the spotlight as well. They have displayed their creations at farmers’ markets and holiday fairs and festivals throughout the community. And all those little girls who line up weekly at the dance studio door have performed on the high school’s stage to an auditorium full of cheering community members. Anyone sitting in that audience, watching those budding ballerinas twirl, couldn’t help but notice that a believed-in child is a powerful thing.

Two years ago, Alicia’s husband was severely injured in a workplace accident. Knowing that she now faced the daunting prospect of helping him battle his way back through multiple surgeries and grueling months of rehabilitation, while also continuing to balance full-time employment with tending to the needs of her small daughter and helping her parents, who are recent immigrants, acclimate to their new lives, I was certain she would be forced to bring Working Together to a halt.

She didn’t consider it for a moment. In fact, she seemed only to redouble her efforts to ensure its growth. It was then that I came to see that, in Alicia’s eyes, Working Together isn’t just an organization. It’s a weapon. She sees herself as embroiled in a battle, and she understands exactly what she’s up against: the hopelessness and sense of worthlessness that have always tried to lure these children – growing up low-income among affluence, and as outsiders among the entrenched – down the wrong path.

A path that would lead them towards involvement with drugs, toward dropping out of school, toward depression and despair and, ultimately, the death of their souls. Nothing, I quickly came to understand, was going to make her surrender that battle. Because Alicia de la Cruz believes in the power of dreams, and she’s not backing down.