Fall 2024 Stakeholder Update from Omar Carrera, CEO

Dear Friends,

I want to take a moment to thank you for your generous support, which was crucial for us to secure, renovate, and relocate into our new headquarters. In so doing, we have now met a long-term goal of ensuring our permanence and stability in this community and our continued support of Latinos in Marin County.  

Our staff and client community have settled into our new headquarters at 711 Grand Avenue in San Rafael, which now houses our Immigration, Education, Economic Mobility, Policy and Civic Engagement, and Administration departments. Our Social Services and Behavioral Health teams and our weekly food pantry continue to operate from our neighborhood site at 91 Larkspur Street.

With an important election right around the corner, Canal Alliance’s services are — perhaps more than ever before — relevant and essential. We continue to be devoted to supporting the Latino immigrant community to achieve and maintain stability and prosperity here in Marin County. To that end, I am delighted to share several updates with you about our progress and our path forward: 

Leveraging our new Headquarters: Expanded Partnership with College of Marin 

As I mentioned last spring, our partnership with College of Marin (COM) is expanding. In Spring 2025, COM will teach six English as a Second Language (ESL) classes at our new 711 Grand headquarters site, with Canal Alliance staff providing case management and navigation support to resources at COM and in the community. We are currently recruiting 180+ adult students for those classes, through a strategy that includes digital literacy as a tool to help prepare students for COM classes and civic engagement more generally.  

Dr. Jonathan Eldridge, College of Marin’s Superintendent and President shares: “College of Marin is thrilled to expand access to higher education through our partnership with Canal Alliance. By bringing learning opportunities to people where it is most convenient to them, we are better able to meet our mission as the community’s college.”

This is just the first of many expanded or new partnerships we aim to launch by leveraging our new location to bring more services to the community. We are also in exploratory discussions regarding additional partnerships with the Marin County Free Library to offer Citizenship Classes, Community Action Marin for Tax Services, and TAM Adult School for GED programs. By utilizing our new classrooms and engaging community partners like COM, we will be able to serve more students and clients, directly improving their advancement toward financial stability. 

Raising Community Voices: Nuestro Canal, Nuestro Futuro 

We are proud to share that on October 19 we formally launched our Nuestro Canal, Nuestro Futuro (NCNF) initiative, a community planning and capacity-building program for the Canal neighborhood of San Rafael. The initiative will evaluate and redress environmental and climate injustice and support residents to have a meaningful voice in government decision-making processes. As a collaborative comprised of residents, local government agencies, nonprofit partners, and Canal Alliance, NCNF aims to remedy the interconnected challenges of climate adaptation, housing, transportation, broadband access and green economic inclusion. This initiative matches our place-based strategy to improve the Canal neighborhood with a resident-led planning process where residents themselves can identify local challenges and develop solutions for essential neighborhood infrastructure.  

Preparing & Supporting the Community: Know Your Rights & Voter Outreach 

With an election around the corner, we are, as always, committed to advancing the knowledge on immigrants’ legal rights. More and more, we see campaign messages using demeaning and othering language about immigrants, and increasingly pushing the criminalization of human migration. To counter these communications, our Immigration Legal Services (ILS) team is hard at work to advance informed, accurate, and positive information about immigrants and their rights. The team is collaborating with organizations such as Causa Justa and Immigration Legal Resources Center to leverage their expertise and resources and provide accurate legal information to our staff, clients, and community members. We are also working across teams to expand access to information and resources to increase understanding and reduce fear and anxiety among our clients and the community. Our ILS team hosts regular trainings for staff, maintains a presence at community events to ensure we reach all community members, and disseminates materials through our marketing channels, ensuring that relevant, accurate, and timely updates are broadly shared with our community.  

Our Policy & Civic Engagement team is also working to increase Latino votership. Based on our mission of helping Latinos to live, learn, work and succeed here in Marin, we are increasingly convinced that we can only achieve these goals if the local Latino community has a real say in the policy decisions that affect our lives and livelihoods. We have, therefore, expanded our efforts to build Latino political power in Marin, so that candidates and elected officials will consistently take the needs and requests of our community into account. In the lead-up to the November 2024 elections, our team is working to increase Latino voter registration and voter turnout across our community. 

Everyone Deserves a Safe Place to Call Home: Vote for Affordable Housing 

Marin voters will have a chance to take meaningful steps to address the worsening housing crisis during the November 2024 election. Our team at Canal Alliance has assessed state and local ballot measures that would impact housing in our community and has made recommendations to support affordable housing. 

Building Capacity for Climate Resilience: California Climate Leaders Fellowship 

I am thrilled to have been selected to serve as a California Climate Leaders Fellow in the first cohort of a program led by the Center for Community Investment (CCI), in collaboration with The California Endowment. The program is aimed at helping leaders address the challenges created by climate change through advocacy, investment, and system change; over the next year, I will participate with a cohort of leaders to develop the skills and strategies necessary to build climate resilience and equity across California. This opportunity could not come at a more crucial time, and will prepare me, and Canal Alliance, to attract and secure capital for implementing the recommendations that Canal residents will identify as part of the NCNF neighborhood visioning work mentioned above. 

Increasing Latino Visibility in Marin: Canal Alliance’s Rooftop Mural Project 

Located at the intersection of the Highway 101 northbound exit ramp into downtown San Rafael, Canal Alliance’s new headquarters at 711 Grand Avenue is central and visible. Atop the roof of our new building, four inspiring murals will tell a visual story of our local Latino heritage. Two of the murals are now complete, thanks to a grant of $20,000 from Starbucks and $25,000 from the Downtown San Rafael Arts District, made possible by a grant from the California Arts Council. This art holds significant meaning for us as a powerful statement that says, “We’re here. This is home.”  

To oversee the project, Canal Alliance established a Mural Project Advisory Group comprised of 10 staff, board and community members, and partnered with Canal Arts, a nonprofit coalition of 14 Marin County-based organizations that support the creation of public art. Three artists, Pablo Arroyo, Pancho Pescador, and Yano Rivera, have already completed the first two murals as a bold statement on the 101-facing rooftops of the headquarters building. The name of the project, “Threads of Unity,” highlights the project’s goal of bringing our diverse community together through a visual that captures the cultural heritage and vitality of our local Latino community by combining elements from indigenous textiles and cultural symbols. 

The total project budget for four murals is $120,000, including costs associated with mural development, artist fees, project management, community engagement, signage, lighting and installation. To date we have secured $45,000. If you would like to learn more about supporting this meaningful and inspiring project, please contact Zach Fernandez, Major Gifts Officer, at 415-306-0403 or zacharyf@canalalliance.org. 

I want to reiterate my gratitude and appreciation for your support of Canal Alliance and the Latino community. I invite you to contact me to learn more about the news shared in this letter. To schedule a visit or tour, please contact me directly or Jennifer Caynan, Senior Manager of Leadership Giving, at jenniferc@canalalliance.org.  

Without you, our progress and success would not be possible. Thank you for all you do to make Marin a place where everyone can live, learn, work, and succeed.  

Gracias,  

Omar Carrera  
Chief Executive Officer