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SCW SPRING 2016

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14 SANTA CRUZ WOMAN | SPRING 2016 Carmen Herrera Mansir admires the people who seek her help starting small businesses. Their aspirations and determination remind her of her parents, whose bakery in Tijuana, Mexico financed the education of nine children. "I always tell people if my father had not decided to start the business, they never would have been able to pay for private school for all of us," Herrera says. "That really changed the lives of our family." As executive director of the nonprofit El Pájaro Community Development Corp., Herrera fosters change in the lives of other families in similar fashion. "It's a place where I could apply everything I learned in my life, not just the formal education, but also my life experience," she says. Herrera, 53, grew up in Tijuana in a family whose forebears straddled the border between the U.S. and Mexico. She quips that in her binational, bicultural family potatoes and beans were both staples. Working alongside her parents as a child, she saw how hard they worked to transform the small doughnut shop they founded into a successful bakery with 30 employees, a business that 52 years later continues to provide financial security for her 80-year-old mother. A dozen years ago, Herrera moved to the U.S. to enroll in a master's degree program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. By then, she had earned a law degree in Mexico, worked on a binational wastewater treatment project and founded a worker training center. A visit to a Pájaro Valley migrant camp where she discovered migrants living in shabby trailers and crowded conditions sparked an interest in economic development here. "People think because they cross the border, they are going to make all this money," Herrera says. "But the migrant camp looked exactly like the conditions in Mexico's poor colonias." El Pájaro CDC, which promotes economic opportunity through entrepreneurship, helps people escape that poverty, she says. The organization provides training, technical assistance, access to financing and low-cost facilities to small businesses. Its commercial kitchen incubator, for example, rents workspace and equipment, reducing start-up costs. Since she took the helm a decade ago, the organization has grown from its Watsonville base to serve a three-county region. Herrera has formed partnerships with federal agencies, banks and foundations to broaden its reach. "We're supporting other people's ideas," Herrera says. "That's what I love about my job. I see our clients as agents of change." Devoted to the mission, she is often at her desk in downtown Watsonville long after the dinner hour and on weekends as well. She recalls her father working three days without coming home during the annual Three Kings celebration, when Mexicans enjoy a special bread. "You have to do what you have to do to make it happen," she says. Still, Herrera hopes to find more time for family and friends and to focus more on her health. She also wants to find ways to improve the lives of Mexico's poor. "I don't think I'm going to retire anytime soon or ever," she says. Agent of Change Carmen Herrera Mansir inspires change through entrepreneurialism "We're supporting other people's ideas. That's what I love about my job. I see our clients as agents of change." By Donna Jones Carmen Herrera Mansir Nonprofit Executive Director Photo by Lexie Corfiatis

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