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Rubén Lizardo
Clara Luz Navarro
Gilbert Sanchez

Rubén Lizardo
For the past 15 years, Rubén Lizardo has been active in addressing the root causes of youth and community violence through reform efforts aimed at improving education and career opportunities for youth and adults in East and South Central Los Angeles.

As the education and training director at Community Development Technologies Center (CD Tech), Lizardo is responsible for coordinating all education and training programs in the field of community development. The curriculum incorporates a wide variety of inter-disciplinary courses focusing on community planning and economic development, inter-ethnic organizing, community-based strategies for preventing violence and civic activism. Under Lizardo’s coordination, CD Tech Center offers an Associate Arts degree that targets at risk youth. The degree, in Community Planning and Economic Development, is offered in conjunction with Los Angeles Trade Technical College. Lizardo developed the degree curricula and created an intensive summer Community Building Institute.

As a former co-director at the Los Angeles-based MultiCultural Collaborative, Lizardo was principally responsible for facilitating the organization’s response to the urgent need to improve relations across racial and economic lines in Los Angeles. Lizardo helped establish a conflict mediation network and the Community School Initiative to build inter-ethnic organizing and mediation capacity among parents and youth engaged in school reform.

Lizardo serves as a board member of the Watts/Century Latino Organization, which co-sponsors Parents and Students Organized for Excellence in Our Schools and Communities (PASO) in Watts. Through membership in PASO, Black and Latino parents and students engage in joint efforts to address high drop-out rates, low college participation, and the need for multicultural curricula and effective conflict resolution programs.

In 1992, Mr. Lizardo joined a multiethnic group of community leaders to establish the African/Latino Youth Summit, a unique leadership development and organizing project to defuse inter-ethnic conflict in public schools and build ties between black and brown youth.

Clara Luz Navarro
Clara Luz Navarro has spent most of her life working to improve the lives of women, first as a nurse active in the struggle for social justice in El Salvador and then as a community organizer and anti-violence advocate in the United States.

Navarro graduated from San Salvador’s National Nursing School in 1967 and was a practicing nurse and student of public administration during the 1960s and 1970s. As the repression in El Salvador increased in the early 1980s, she and other medical workers employed in conflict zones in the countryside became targets of persecution. Two physicians whom she worked closely with were captured by death squads, tortured and killed. After she began receiving anonymous death threats, Navarro left El Salvador in 1989.

After arriving in the United States, Navarro was hired by a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, to conduct interviews with immigrant women for a study on nutrition and acculturation. In conducting hundreds of interviews, she began to understand the severity of domestic violence among Latina immigrants as a crisis that is often compounded by extreme social isolation and poverty.

In 1989, Navarro co-founded Mujeres Unidas y Activas, which operates under the auspices of the San Francisco-based Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. The philosophy of the organization is grounded in consciousness-raising for personal survival and political effectiveness. Now with more than 300 members, the majority of whom are survivors of domestic violence, MUA sponsors a variety of outreach projects on issues such as child abuse, youth violence, AIDS, citizenship, education and health care.

Navarro serves as a consultant to San Francisco General Hospital, where she helps improve physicians’ responses to the special needs of abused immigrant women.

Other programs developed by Navarro include three cooperatives: Manos Sabrosas, a catering business; Manos Carińosos, a home health care business; and Pachamama (meaning Mother Earth in the Quechua language), a gardening project in San Francisco’s Mission District. Navarro and Mujeres Unidas y Activas have been recognized by the American Public Health Association’s Latino Caucus for leadership as a community organization.

Gilbert Sanchez
Gilbert Sanchez is the founder and director of the Gang Violence Bridging Project (GVBP), based at the Edmund G. "Pat" Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. The project works to abate gang violence by creating proactive, multi-generational collaborative approaches to ending violence in geographic areas severely impacted by urban poverty. In his role as director, Sanchez is responsible for the planning, recruitment, implementation and fundraising activities that structure the Gang Violence Bridging Project’s eleven programs.

A former gang member, Sanchez is known for his commitment to gang intervention, prevention and counseling, and his empathy and resourcefulness on behalf of young people "at risk." His primary concerns are 1) attracting additional resources to enhance the gang intervention work currently in progress in Los Angeles, and 2) providing alternatives to youth who are trying to leave gangs behind and pursue educational and career opportunities.

Sanchez spearheaded the creation of the Association of Community Based Gang Intervention Workers. Based at Cal State LA, the association works to educate policymakers and the public about the unique value and specific skills of gang prevention and intervention workers, the majority of whom are former gang members.

Sanchez makes frequent presentations about the causes of gang and youth violence to various government and law enforcement agencies. These include instructional presentations to students at high schools, colleges and universities across the United States. He often testifies as a gang expert in court and before legislative committees. He has served as an advisor to the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Among his numerous awards, Sanchez is the recipient of a Certificate of Appreciation from the City of Los Angeles, presented by Councilmember Rita Walters, and a Certificate of Recognition from Senator Richard Polanco.