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.
For Norma Mercado, community work starts with listening to the people who call Bastrop County, Texas home. As executive director of Bastrop County Cares, Mercado brings more than two decades of experience in social work and education to an organization focused on bringing residents and community partners together to tackle local challenges. Her work centers on issues ranging from child care and health care access to economic stability and transportation, with an emphasis on finding solutions alongside the people most affected.
In this Q&A, Mercado talks about her path to Bastrop County Cares, the needs she sees across the county, and what keeps her hopeful about Bastrop County’s future.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Daily Yonder: Norma, you have worn countless hats within the Bastrop community. What was your path to joining Bastrop County Cares?
Norma Mercado: Before coming to Bastrop County Cares, I worked in Bastrop Independent School District. I oversaw the social work department, the highly mobile student population, which included homelessness, foster care, military-connected, and teen pregnancy-related services, as well as Title I parent engagement.
In that role, before joining Bastrop County Cares, I also participated in the organization’s programming, such as community meetings and collaborative initiatives.
One of the reasons I’m so passionate about this work is because I see myself in the community we serve. As someone who navigated homelessness, teen pregnancy, and poverty, I know what a difference it makes when you have access to resources and how my life could have been easier. My mom would have had access to those resources, and that is why I am passionate about the work that I do. I feel like education is power, and we can really change the impact and outcomes for our children and our youth.
DY: What is some of the recent work happening at Bastrop County Cares?
NM: I’ve been working to use a collective impact framework to strengthen our collaborative work. Our collaboratives focus on addressing the non-medical drivers of health. The idea is that community members can join the collaborative that best connects with what they’re seeing in the community and what they want to support. Right now, we have four collaboratives that meet regularly and focus on different non-medical drivers of health.
One is focused on education. We have a lot of school district representatives who participate, along with local library representatives, parents, Head Start, and others. Right now, their focus is on improving literacy rates among our students. They’re looking at things like increasing access to library cards and books, identifying the needs they’re seeing in the community, and then determining what initiatives they can lead to address those needs.
Then we have economic stability, which is currently focused on workforce development. They’re looking at ways to make sure families have access to resources that can help them improve their job skills, write resumes, and things like that. Our broadband task force and food insecurity task force are also part of this collaborative. Once a collaborative identifies an area they want to work on, we break into task forces, and those task forces are made up of different community members who can help move that work forward.
We also have the health collaborative, which is currently focused on pregnancy-related services and support for older adults. They’re also working on creating a resource guide.
Our last one is the Thriving Communities collaborative, which is also part of our interagency meetings. This is a little different from the other collaboratives because it’s more of a networking opportunity for local nonprofits. They come together to support one another, share what’s coming up for their organizations, and identify opportunities to work together. They don’t really have a set agenda. It’s more of a space for networking and collaboration, and when there’s a specific need or ask, they can come together to address it.
For example, in the past, they’ve worked together to organize resource fairs, with different organizations helping to create and coordinate the space. So that group looks a little different from our other collaboratives because of its focus on bringing interagency partners together.
A big part of the collective impact model is always asking, “Who’s in the room? Who’s missing? And whose voice still needs to be here?” That’s especially important when it comes to people with lived experience. Oftentimes, when we ask those questions, the participants themselves identify who else needs to be invited, and they’re continually bringing more people into the conversation.
We want to make sure that when we develop a solution or initiative, people with lived experience are included in the decision-making process. I think that’s an ongoing effort across each collaborative and task force, to make sure we’re including the people who have lived experience and that their voices are part of the work we’re doing.
Bastrop County Cares is focused on improving literacy rates among schoolchildren in the county. (Photo courtesy of Norma Mercado)
DY: What are some of the most pressing needs or challenges that have been identified in these collaboratives?NM: The need for childcare is something that comes up in all of the collaboratives. We don’t have enough funding or enough spaces for childcare, so we now have a task force that’s going to be working on that. We have a couple of mothers, for example, who are part of these meetings and want to open their own childcare businesses. So we’re trying to do different things to see what the challenges are when someone is trying to open a childcare business, and then how we can help these mothers who want to do this so they can become more economically stable if this becomes a business for them as well.
Another one of the concerns continues to be helping people access health care. A lot of the families we’re working with need to either get on some kind of medical insurance or Medicaid, so right now we’re really looking at ways to increase awareness about how families can get back on Medicaid or what is available to them in their community so they can access preventative care. I think that is something that we have identified as a big need, especially with the number of families who qualify but aren’t connected yet or aren’t engaged in either Medicaid or food stamps. And so that is something that we’re looking at: How can we get more funding to get families more connected and help them enroll in those services?
DY: What are ways that Bastrop County Cares is supporting community-based solutions and innovation when it comes to taking care of each other?
NM: Our Care Rides initiative came about when we identified that a lot of our seniors don’t have a way to get to their medical appointments. In rural communities, we don’t have enough transportation infrastructure, and so we had a group of volunteers who said, “I am available to transport a senior.”
Now we have a pilot program where we pay the volunteers for their time and mileage, and they’re taking elderly people to their appointments. They’re doing it whether we have funding or not. They’re doing it because they care about their neighbors. They want to make sure that their senior citizens are taken care of, and so that is really exciting to see that they had the solution. Someone came forward and said, “I can help.”
DY: It sounds like this work can be a balancing act between identifying a large volume of needs and developing solutions with limited funding. As you navigate these realities, what brings you hope right now?NM: It’s been really challenging with all the DEI and the different cuts that we’ve seen for nonprofits and from the state, but what gives me hope is that people are just passionate about helping their community thrive. I get really excited because we might not have all the money, but we have the community that comes together to really come up with solutions.
I firmly believe that the solutions are in the community. We just need the funding. And so it gives me hope that, even though we experience cuts, the community still doesn’t shy away from coming together and coming up with solutions to address some of the needs that we have in our community.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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