The doors at the old Spanish Mission-style building on Edith Boulevard just north of Lomas are locked this week, and there’s not a peep from the playground.
For the first time in its 85-year history, the Martineztown House of Neighborly Service is closed.
Four-year-olds Emilio Sarmiento, Marcos Martinez and Blaze Diabo, from left, read a book about frogs at the Martineztown House of Neighborly Service last week. (DEAN HANSON/JOURNAL)
We’re all stumbling through this rotten economy, so the suspension of services this week at the Martineztown House isn’t that hard to understand. Take away some state child-care assistance, trim contributions from United Way, dry up some individual donations and grant funding, and you’ve got a budget that doesn’t come close to balancing. Tough times mean tough decisions for nonprofit community organizations.
But unless you live in the Martineztown-Santa Barbara neighborhood east of Downtown Albuquerque, you won’t grasp what this actually means.
Let’s take a look: It means a gaggle of kids is no longer shepherded down the block in the morning to classes at Longfellow Elementary School and then walked back to after-school programs at Martineztown House in the afternoon. It means no free books for those kids, either.
Come Thanksgiving, it means no warm turkey with all the fixings, prepared and delivered to home-bound viejos. It means 250 families won’t get food baskets or gifts at Christmas; neighborhood residents won’t be able to drop by for emergency food or clothes for their kids; and a few dozen working parents are looking elsewhere for high-quality child care.
It means a poor neighborhood has lost one more advocate for safe streets and better services.
The board of directors of Martineztown House, which was founded by the Presbyterian Church 85 years ago and uses a wing of Second Presbyterian Church for a nominal rent of $1 a year, reluctantly shut the doors on Tuesday.
The organization’s annual expenses totaled about $316,000 last year, and its income – about $100,000 in revenue from child-care services it provides and the remainder from grants and donations – amounted to only about $291,000.
“It’s really very simple,” board President Kathy Jackson said. “We’ve run out of money.”
The board will spend the next six months fundraising and evaluating the Martineztown House mission. It plans to be back in business.
“Our intention is to reopen in six months with a fresh start,” Jackson said.
Still, for the people who rely on what amounts to a community center, a day-care center and a food bank under one roof, and for the people who have spent careers keeping those services alive and are now looking for new jobs, this is a gloomy week.
Loretta Naranjo Lopez, who is 51 and has lived in Martineztown her entire life, remembers pressing her hand into clay in a ceramics class at the Martineztown House when she was a toddler and later going to Girl Scout meetings there.
“It’s been part of my life forever,” she told me. “It’s definitely a great loss.”
Ivon Martinez, who walks her four children to Martineztown House for various services every morning, will be looking after the kids herself now, and she knows they’ll miss it.
“It’s like a second home for my kids,” she told me.
The board of directors was aware that suspending services would be a hardship on the neighborhood, Jackson told me, but had no choice.
“We’ve been in business for 85 years, serving the needs of the community in Martineztown the whole time,” Jackson said. “This is not a decision that anyone wants to make.”
One of the newly unemployed staffers is Eugenia Cabiedes, who has worked at the Martineztown House since 1992 and until this week was its executive director.
“I’m so proud of this program,” Cabiedes told me last week as she was preparing to pack up and leave.
She’s proud of offering affordable bilingual child care to families that fall well below the poverty line, of growing fresh food on site and feeding vulnerable kids wholesome meals cooked on site with nothing coming from a can. She’s proud of offering a place where people from one of the oldest Albuquerque neighborhoods can gather to gossip and help one another out and organize for a better future.
Here’s a drab little puzzle: When tough times dry up funding to organizations that help people get through tough times, times get tougher.
Now, Cabiedes says, “I’m looking for a job.”
UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie Linthicum at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal
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