Raices y Carino is a cross-cultural family center on Freedom Boulevard in Watsonville. We provide an equitable, inclusive, and safe space for the community to gather and raise their children together. We focus on connecting diverse families, educators, and organizations to create cross-cultural connections and wellbeing for the whole family. When you visit the center, you see adults interacting with children across languages and cultures, sharing their lives in the most beautiful way. Our hope is that this foundation paves the way for future generations throughout the county to value a multicultural society.

We've long held bilingual ceramics classes twice a year with attendees as young as 7 and as old as 70. Our ceramics instructor has dreamed of shifting from a pop-up type setup with folding tables and lots of loading/unloading to a dedicated space. After we received an eviction notice just last month, we found a different building by the Watsonville Airport that not only is a fabulous fit for our overall programs, but also has enough room that we can create a permanent makerspace and ceramics studio within the center.

This grant will be used to complete a partition so the creative space can be separate from other activities at the center. This allows us to increase the frequency of our art and ceramics classes, and to offer multiple programs at once.