News

Not long ago, a short email went out to Marina leaders:

Tomorrow Thursday we are receiving Meals on Wheels frozen meals to share with MPUSD families in Marina. We will be distributing from 2–3 p.m. This will be a weekly event for the time being.

A routine message. But also a glimpse of something larger: a community learning how to organize itself around the wellbeing of children.

Located on the Central Coast of California, Marina CA is home to approximately 23,000 people. A small contingent of those people are working hard to continue to shape the city into a more welcoming and wholesome place for children to live: to become an Ancestor City.

The concept of being an Ancestor City might be new to the language, but not new to the system. Marina is a place in which community and civic leaders have worked together for decades to build both infrastructure and support networks to improve the quality of life of children.

Through the vehicle of the local school district, Monterey Peninsula Unified School District, members of the school community and local community come together on a monthly basis to converse around positive change. The team has found themselves grappling with some of the following questions:

How can we develop systems and practices to ensure that all of the approximately 4,500 children living in Marina have food security?

How can we partner with our local community members to provide before- and after-school opportunities for children to engage in, to keep them focused and growing in a safe and welcoming environment?

There is an old African proverb that represents the work of becoming an Ancestor City: It takes a village to raise a child. Yet in our complex world, this village does not have only one leader. Through a child’s existence, there are many forms of leaders. At the monthly Ancestor City meetings all respective leaders come together: the mayor and City of Marina representatives, leaders of the local school district, leaders of local nonprofits, and community activists.

In his 1964 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously stated, “I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.”

Our vision of an Ancestor City means the audacity to believe it isn’t audacious to believe that our families and kids will have three meals a day regardless of their financial circumstances. Our most current project is bridging the gap of food insecurity for students and citizens of Marina over the summer. Our vision is to feed as many families as possible during the scope of June and July.

Most recently, the team met at Marina City Hall to engage in system mapping of existing resources for food. Through dialogue with multiple stakeholders, we realized that finding the right resources was difficult and felt very disjointed, even for those of us familiar with navigating bureaucratic systems.

We are working hard to develop a roadmap of existing food opportunities for students and families, and utilizing our leadership capacities to bolster those opportunities and expand them. We believe that, in order to be an Ancestor City, we need to start with providing children with their most basic needs — most importantly food. We are trying to make access to this basic need as simple for families as possible.

The Center for Systems Awareness likes to encourage practitioners to follow the energy and see what grows. We found that by doing so, we have collected additional partners, including leaders from our local health care systems who have a vision of bringing wellness to Marina.

Our mission has started, and due to our continued work, any child 18 or under will have access to a brown bag lunch from our schools; families will have a food distribution and access event in June; the City of Marina is exploring extending its Senior Food Distribution to potentially serve families with children; and the local Veterans Association is exploring expanding its food distribution to serve families throughout the summer.

Our Ancestor City appreciates its partnership with the Center for Systems Awareness due to their continued partnership and coaching to make this vision a reality for our city.

Perhaps what encourages us most is that this work often begins in simple ways: a conversation, a meeting, a practical email asking people to help make sure families have food.

What may look small can carry something larger.

A routine message about meals became one more expression of a community organizing itself around children’s wellbeing. In that sense, perhaps an Ancestor City is built this way — through people gathering around what matters, following the energy, and seeing what grows.

Alan Crawford and Alessandro Tani