Join us in congratulating Piña Madera who has been honored with our 2024 Mike Tobia Award for Community Leadership.
The Mike Tobia Award for Community Leadership recognizes an outstanding Community Leader, dedicated to serving residents' needs with compassion and dignity, while fostering a sense of belonging for all. It is named for Mike Tobia who founded Mt. Calvary Community Supper which, through the collective efforts of hundreds of volunteers, sponsors and donors has served over 55,000 meals since its inception in 2012. Mike was an inspired leader, organizer, collaborator, and innovator -- and a close friend of Acton-Boxborough United Way. Mike intentionally extended the table to everyone who wanted to be part of the supper and treated every guest with compassion and dignity, while fostering a sense of belonging for all.
Piña has been instrumental in creating the innovative English language program for Acton’s emergency shelter. A key unmet need when the shelter first opened was English lessons. We reached out to a couple key community partners who do English lessons well, but none had the bandwidth to bring a new program on-site as was really necessary at Minuteman Inn.
Fortunately, an Acton resident and Parker Charter School Spanish teacher, Piña Madera, stepped up and offered her creativity and expertise to help create a program that would work for these new neighbors.
Classes are onsite and meet 5 days per week, run by 2 volunteers each time. Classes are energetic, interactive, and prioritize useful phrases and repetition of key words over teaching grammar. Students engage in games, songs, role-playing activities and plenty of movement. If a student misses a day, they will not be left behind, and can comfortably return as soon as they can.
Topics are adapted to the needs, interest and level of the students, and based on input from the shelter manager and the case workers. There’s so much laughter, connection, dancing and smiles! Even the kids happily join whenever they are not in school, bringing even more enthusiasm and joy! It is so rewarding when we hear from the shelter staff “The EL students now proudly greet us in English, and try to answer our questions in English whenever they can, even though we do speak their native language!! It’s amazing to see.” This program is now being used as a model at other emergency shelters in the state.
For her kindness and innovation, we are proud to present Piña with this year’s Mike Tobia Award for Community Leadership.