During This Back to School Season, MICOP Gives More Than 1,000 backpacks to the community.

By: Miguel Hernandez

(Listen to our audio in Spanish and Mixteco, variant from Guadalupe Nundaca 5 min)

During this back-to-school season, the nonprofit Mixteco Indigenous Community Organizing Project (MICOP) distributed more than 1,000 backpacks filled with school supplies in Oxnard, Santa Maria, and Paso Robles to help the Indigenous community. The long list of school supplies that families must purchase for back-to-school creates great anxiety for agriculture-working families who often live on low incomes. 

To help alleviate these economic and food insecurities among the Indigenous farmworker community, MICOP hosts an annual backpack distribution and a monthly food distribution named “reunion mensual,” where bags of food, diapers, and information about assistance programs are given to the community.

The driving force and heart behind these initiatives is MICOP’s program director, Norma Gómez, who shared how MICOP has been organizing these backpack distributions for more than 15 years and how it emerged as a direct response to the needs of the community. Gómez shared how initially, when the organization started, they spoke directly to the community and asked what the biggest challenges they faced were, and going back to school was always one of those. 

Gómez also shared how essential this resource is for the community because “during the back-to-school season, work in the fields tends to decrease, and it is very difficult for large families to buy supplies for everyone.”

In Oxnard, 600 backpacks were distributed, and hundreds of families lined up with anticipation and excitement to receive them. Many of the families who participated expressed their gratitude to the organization for its efforts to help a community that is commonly forgotten and ignored.

Gómez also shared that one of her biggest goals is “for all the children to have new backpacks for the school year, and for there to be no child in our community who is left without a backpack.” Gómez also shared how important it is for children to have a new backpack to start the year and not all Indigenous children have that privilege. Finally, Gómez expressed how proud she feels to be able to bring change and relief to her community.  

Finally, Gómez enthusiastically and optimistically shared that she would like there to be “more support for the distribution of backpacks, greater financial funds to be able to offer better quality backpacks to provide greater satisfaction and better service to the indigenous migrant community since they are the future.”