Junta for Progressive Action
12/25/2005
Mary E. O’Leary , Register Topics Editor
Kica Matos, director of JUNTA for Progressive Action in New Haven, is the Register’s Person of the Year 2005.Mara Lavitt/Register
Editor’s note: Hardship often brings out the best in people. For this year’s Register Person of the Year, candidates displayed amazing leadership in the face of daunting odds. Our Person of the Year is helping improve an entire community. Two other very worthy candidates were leaders in other ways: One sidestepped bureaucracy and sent teams of doctors to the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina. The other inspired millions with his heroic struggle to overcome personal tragedy. Their stories are testament to the power of the human spirit.
NEW HAVEN — Four years ago, JUNTA for Progressive Action was in the throes of a near-death experience.
Located in a crumbling house on Grand Avenue, the city’s oldest Latino community service organization offered few programs and had only a handful of diehard board members.
The light at the end of the tunnel for the 36-year-old organization turned out to be a former federal defense lawyer looking for a job in New Haven.
With 14 years’ experience working for civil rights advocacy groups, Kica Matos — the Register’s Person of the Year for 2005 — is credited with JUNTA’s transformation into a model service provider and powerful community force.
This year, 4,000 people came through the doors of the restored 1853 two-story house, where they took language and computer classes, got help with housing, labor, economic and immigration issues and sent their kids for after-school and summer programs.
There are now 10 staff members, collaborations with city schools, as well as the Yale Law School and Yale Child Study Center, and a budget shored up by foundation and private support. The budget is no longer tethered to fluctuating government grants.
"She has just been quite extraordinary. She really is someone who, whether intuitively or through her work, just understands that you leave the world a better place than you find it," said Yale Law School Professor Robert Solomon.
"She has just put everything into the community," he said. "She really understands in a way that very few people do that it is not about her, it’s about what you can accomplish."
Matos, 39, the new executive director, lives two blocks from her office with her husband and 8-month-old baby in the Fair Haven neighborhood, which has always been home to waves of immigrants, first from Europe and now from Central and South America.
One of two recipients of the 2005 John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award, given to young Americans who are changing their communities through public service, Matos will also receive the exemplary public service award in February from her alma mater, Cornell Law School.
Matos radiates energy and warmth as she talks about JUNTA and the serendipitous turn of events that brought her there.
Puerto Rico to Fiji
A self-described "island girl," she was born in Puerto Rico, but spent most of her formative years in Fiji, where her father worked for the United Nations, and then New Zealand, where she graduated from Victoria University of Wellington. She then earned a master’s in political science from the New School in New York and a law degree at Cornell.
She said she was enormously impressed by her time in New Zealand, where she found a large middle class, no homelessness and progressive leaders working to address land repatriation for the native people.
"New Zealand had a huge influence on me on how government can provide for its people," Matos said.
Interested in human rights issues, she worked for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Amnesty International, where, sitting in a staff meeting one day, a colleague reported on a death penalty case in the U.S. involving a mentally retarded black juvenile convicted by an all-white jury in a Southern state.
"I just felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. This is the only epiphany I have ever had," Matos recalled of her decision to work to eliminate capital punishment.
For 11 years she was involved in these cases, including a stint as an assistant federal defender in Philadelphia, representing inmates in state post-conviction and federal habeas corpus proceedings, where victory meant life without parole for her clients.
"It was the most intensive, exhausting work I have ever done," Matos said of the experience.
While sitting around with her fellow litigators, Matos said they would speculate about what other careers they might pursue and it always came down to community work that was life affirming and provided alternatives for people at risk.
"When I heard about JUNTA, this job offer was dangling in front of me and I realized this was exactly what I was thinking about years ago," she said.
Matos made the move here to settle down with Henry Fernandez, who at the time was the city’s economic development director.
"There was a lot of negotiation, but I agreed to make the first move," she said of accommodating their growing careers.
What she found in New Haven were the usual language barriers and lack of resources for poor Latinos, but also problems that were singular to the newest immigrants, up to 5,000 of whom may be illegal.
"We recognized that there were unique needs that new immigrants have that weren’t addressed by our traditional programs," she said of the addition of a legal clinic now staffed by the Yale Law School and New Haven Legal Assistance Association, which provides help with immigrant law and labor violations.
"We have been able to establish a level of trust in the community so that we are able to start going after people who almost make it a living to scam and prey on the most vulnerable," Matos said.
"People come in and confide a lot of problems that I think they would have in the past just put up with," she said of robbery and domestic violence victims.
She credits the Police Department with reaching out to the new immigrants to encourage them to come forward and report crimes, and a city administration sympathetic to immigrant needs.
Matos said JUNTA helped get a woman arrested who was taking large sums of money for illegal documents, while the agency has also confronted employers who pay their workers less than they promised or maintain unsafe conditions.
While the focus has been on Hispanics, no one is turned away, for the children’s programs in particular. There is also outreach to the immediate neighborhood to ensure diversity.
"We don’t just help the Spanish community. We help anyone in need who knocks on the door," said Mildred Castro, a longtime board member.
‘A fresh new voice’
Matos is on several boards, including New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas and Democracy Works, a nonpartisan group that reaches out to groups disengaged from the political process.
"I think she is a fresh new voice on all of the social issues that we are dealing with at the urban level," said Joyce Hamilton Henry, executive director of Democracy Works. "She is clearly someone who is walking the walk in terms of trying to effect policy changes at the local level.
"It’s refreshing to have someone of her age taking on these issues in the way that she is doing it," Henry said of JUNTA’S programs, which "empower people who are impacted to be their own voice."
Pierrette Comulada Silverman, city director of elderly services and chairwoman of JUNTA’s board, said Matos "has had different lives already for someone so young. Professionally, she brings all of those creative juices together, and that’s why she is so effective."
"She is empathetic and caring ... but hard as nails" if she has to be. "That’s what I love about her," she said.
In highly politicized Fair Haven, Yale’s Solomon said one of Matos’ major accomplishments has been to keep her agency apolitical.
"She has been the person who has surmounted that and the notion that she would come in with her connections with Henry (Fernandez) and accomplish that is even more extraordinary," he said. "I’m sure everyone who met her for the first time was suspicious, and yet she did it."
A full schedule
In her role as vice chairwoman of Arts & Ideas, Matos headed the search committee for a new festival director at a time when she was putting in 60 hours a week at JUNTA and expecting a baby.
"She has a tremendous work ethic, a great mind and a wonderful sense of humor," said Jean Handley, one of the co-founders of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. "She looks at life with a wonderfully clear eye, and I think she sees the foibles and humor is one way of working through those foibles."
Silverman is thrilled with the accolades just now coming to Matos, but she worries she will be scooped up by another agency.
"New Haven is better off for having her in it. I really believe that," Silverman said. "I would do anything to keep her."
For her part, Matos is intrigued about possibly living overseas again at some point, saying it offers a completely different perspective on the world than the insular view many Americans have.
But for now, she is content to stay at JUNTA.
"I’m very committed to the work that I’m doing here. I find it challenging and interesting, and I still think I’m relatively new at it, so I’m very focused."
Mary E. O’Leary can be reached at moleary@nhregister.com or 789-5731.