Salinas residents and city leaders join for new kind of social experiment

A group made up of Salinas city leaders and residents is hoping to break down walls and bring the community together through a new kind of social experiment.

About 100 people, half of them from the city, and the other half community advocates, came together for five days to simply talk to one another and build a trusting relationship.

“It was all very new and very different,” Public Works Director Gary Petersen said. “Because no one knew quite what to expect there was certainly a fair amount of anxiety and a lot of hard work – people having conversations they’ve never had, pushing their own edges to reach out to other people they don’t normally talk to.”

In a news conference Tuesday, Petersen and others involved described what they learned in the unique training sessions. Each side was given two days to discuss what issues they wanted to bring up, then on the fifth day, both sides came together to talk about overcoming community problems and the effects of discrimination.

“There was anger, there was crying, there was sadness, there was frustration, there was every emotion in the room that signified people were being honest and letting things out,” Carmen Gil with Building Health Communities (BHC) said.

Gil was one of the people who helped bring both sides together for the training session. But before Gil graduated from college and started working for BHC, she said, she felt like just another girl from East Salinas.

“There’s a lot of success stories out there, they just don’t get highlighted because they get over powered by the negatively and the violence. But that’s not the only thing that’s out there,” Gil said.

What’s out there Gil said is a lot of mistrust and misunderstanding. She knows firsthand the struggles that the east side of town faces, and said it’s mostly because of the language barrier. She used broken sidewalks as an example: something that some residents on the east side said they’ve learned to live with, and on the south side of town, you might not see the same problem.

“If you live on the north or the south side it’s easier for you to speak up for yourself and know the rules and the policies and say this needs to be fixed because of this etc,” Gil said.

But in Salinas, for the first time, for just one week, all sides came together for one common goal, to heal the effects of discrimination.