Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
DJ Salazar is the director of SLV Community Solutions, a collaborative nonprofit in the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado. He also founded Valley Veterans Recreation, a nonprofit that gets veterans outdoors. He’s someone who spends an hour at the grocery store when he runs into a neighbor who wants to chat. And he’s someone deeply invested in the communities that he calls home.
The San Luis Valley is huge and unique – six counties stretch across the high elevation valley with towns dotted across it. It runs from the New Mexico border to some of the highest mountains in the state, bordered by Salida to the north, Wolf Creek Pass to the west, and the Great Sand Dunes National Park to the east.
Salazar calls the valley a “melting pot of cultures” – there’s Spanish, German, Dutch, and Indigenous influences across the region. The largest town is Alamosa, which has almost 10,000 residents, but with small towns dappled across the valley, residents of the region still sometimes struggle to come together. Salazar is the person bringing people and organizations together to make change across the valley.
Ilana Newman
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ilana Newman, Daily Yonder: Can you just tell me a little bit about yourself and what you’re doing with SLV Community Solutions?
DJ Salazar: I’m DJ Salazar. I’m from the San Luis Valley. Been here my whole 35 years of life. Right now I work out of Alamosa and remotely as well, out of San Luis. So I’m all over the valley. I’m the director of SLV Community Solutions, and I also founded a local nonprofit for veterans called Valley Veterans Recreation. If I’m not working, I’m outdoors, or if I’m not outdoors, I’m probably outdoors working.
DY: SLV Community Solutions has a goal of creating solutions through collaboration. Why do you see collaboration as key in a rural community like the San Luis Valley?
DJS: Well, all of our communities are pretty small. Collaboration really helps with capacity building and getting people together who are doing the same things without duplicating the process – trying to help push projects along further. Lately, we’ve had some really great success. We’ve been around for three years now – so our projects are in their third year – and we’ve been able to track the growth. We also do data infrastructure for the Valley right now to help with these collaborations. [A] food access survey was our last one, so we’re able to send that information to other nonprofit organizations or other organizations in the Valley to help see the need, [and] fill the need. Who’s doing what? How to help them better work together? We’re basically the connector to get it going.
DY: Tell me about some of the organizations that you’re collaborating with. What does that look like?
DJS: We’re working with South Central Seniors, which helps out a lot of our senior community in all six counties, and Care and Share [a local food bank]. Right now, [in] one of our counties, our seniors have very little food access. Some of the programs that they had there years ago haven’t been there in a year now, like the Meals on Wheels and the congregate meal place. So, we were able to connect Care and Share with South Central. Now we’re getting more emergency food boxes in Saguache. We’re working on how to make referrals with local agencies there, so people can get the word out about what services South Central provides, so then that way they can have more of a population to serve out there, and they’re not just serving one or two people. So that’s been one of our projects. We’re also hosting a collaboration summit – bring more people together and get people in groups to spark collaboration and see what projects are already going on and how we could work together. You know, instead of being in our own silos and thinking just because we’re 10 miles away from each other, we don’t understand or can’t work with each other.
DY: The San Luis Valley is such a unique place, because it is one geographic region, but there are all these separate towns. Like you said, it’s six counties. That’s huge. Historically, what has collaboration looked like? Have they been siloed, each community kind of doing its own thing?
DJS: A lot of times, what’s happened is that organizations come and go, or leaders come and go, and places get forgotten about, or there’s higher priority, in some [other] places. Working with places like Saguache, they’ve lost trust in some of these organizations. They’re having to fend for themselves. They’re super siloed. [In] Costilla County, places like San Luis (and a lot of those villages that are around those places) just got their market back, like six months ago. Before that, it went three years without a market. So it was zero food access, minus the commodities boxes that come into the two towns: Fort Garland and San Luis. So towns lose a lot of trust. It makes it a little bit harder for them to buy into programming or new organizations wanting to help, and sometimes they’ve never even been offered the help, so they don’t know how to accept it.
DY: What do you do to rebuild that trust?
DJS: Show up. You just keep showing up. With almost everybody we’ve worked with, it’s been, ‘yeah, it sounds good’ when you make the pitch. But it’s the showing up, it’s the follow up. It’s the calling and making sure that they’re good, or if they need anything, and when they ask for something, you accomplish it. Say what you say, do what you say you’re going to do. We’ve had a lot of great success with just making sure, if we say we’re going to show up, we follow up. We make those phone calls. We get them connected with who they need to connect with. That’s built up trust. And then they tell people about what we’re doing. So it makes connections easier as we go along. But it’s definitely just being consistent.
DY: What is that pitch? What do you go in and say, ‘This is what we can offer you’?
DJS: Well, for example, we’ll do our homework before. So for South Central, we knew through our survey that Sauguache was one of the areas that needed help. So we just went in and discussed. We know the needs there, we show them the data, and then we also, again, do our homework with what partners could help. We’re going in with the plan, and then we get them linked up, and then stay in the mix and ask the follow up questions. So we just kind of know ahead of time what they’re going through, and how we can help, as opposed to just saying “we’re here to help and we help solve problems.” The community is so small we run into each other at Safeway or Walmart or wherever, and it turns a ten minute grocery trip into an hour of talking about what’s going on, so it’s been good to be from here. People know what’s going on in our communities. I’ve worked in every realm: housing authority as maintenance, nursing homes as activities and driver. I volunteer a lot with the youth, taking the kids from Monte Vista Kids Connection – we do archery days and fishing days. So when you’re there, you’ll get to hear some things. Parents will tell you what’s going on. Seniors will definitely tell you what’s going on. We absorb it and try to see where we can step in to help.
DY: So it sounds like food is a big focus. Is that just because that’s what you’re hearing or are there other areas you are working in?
DJS: So we do a community needs assessment and we report that back to the state and to the Fed[eral government], and this go round was food access. Because of some of the dire needs that have emerged throughout the past two years, we also do a school supply drive and distribution. Historically, Alamosa would get a backpack school supply drive. And that left out the various other school districts. So we partnered up with La Puente and one of their [programs], Adelante, and we were able to connect with funders and get marketing out. Our first year it was seven different schools, and we were able to get school supplies to 1,500 kids. And then last year we doubled everything – we got to 14 schools, and we helped out 3,500 students. We also get survey questions to ask the parents. What else are they going through? [Do they need] help with bills or utilities? We try to build a picture so we can keep presenting to our board what issues are out there, trying to look at it as a whole and not just one issue
DY: So I know you started the Valley Veterans Recreation, which helps veterans get outside. Can you tell me a little bit more about why it is important to make sure that there are spaces like that for veterans?
DJS: Around here, until recently, there haven’t really been many veteran nonprofits. I was a driver at the Veterans Center in Monte Vista on a nine-month contract. And when I was there, I would take them fishing, any volunteer time I got. They have a lake across the street. So I was like, fishing is a great way to just be distracted and talk. You know, it gets people comfortable. You can open up. And so after I did that, I tried to volunteer to go back and do that, but Covid hit, so volunteering for that was kind of hard. And through Covid, I was just trying to figure out how we could help and get resources out to veterans who may be in need, and also give them a good time, get their minds off things. So I got together with a group of guys, and we were able to form Valley Veterans Recreation. Thanks to the LOR Foundation, they were able to get us money for bows, and we were able to purchase six archery bows, and we’re able to give those out to six different veterans and first responders to start a new hobby. And then that in turn we were donated another six bows by the outdoor depot out of Poncha Springs to keep this initiative going. I’m working on a veterans fishing day coming up this summer, a barbecue, so we can continue to [share] the groups who are doing veterans benefits, who are familiar with the VA system, who could help people navigate. I’ve been getting a lot of phone calls for senior veterans needing remodels on their bathroom so they could get in and out of the shower or use the restroom and stuff. Try to get those resources made available to our community members here. We’re utilizing the outdoors, and everybody loves free burgers and throwing a line in the water around here.
DY:
What inspires you about these communities that you’re working in?
DJS: Everything. I love being around here. I have so many stories from every different corner. I go hiking, and have family in all these corners. And you know, I was raised in almost every one of these towns. If it wasn’t football or wrestling or whatever sport, we would go visit. And then now that the perspective I have on life right now is like seeing the need in our communities. It seems like it’s getting attracted to me – people will tell me what’s going on in these communities. And so it’s inspiring that I’ve been able to crack some of the codes and be able to help. Using that power to continue helping, until more people pick up the torch. So it inspires me to just keep pushing on and to inspire people. And hopefully we could keep our community thriving.
DY: How can people support the work that you’re doing in all these communities?
DJS: We’re on all social media. SLV Community Solutions does have an up to date website. We could always use volunteers. We could always use donations to food banks, or for our school supply drive.
Find DJ and SLV Community Solutions on Facebook, Instagram and their website.
The post Q&A: DJ Salazar Is Big on Rural Collaboration appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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