Serving the community, just like her mother Serving the community, just like her mother (January 13, 2006)

by Jeb Bing

Like mother, like daughter, 25-year-old Heather Hosterman is following on somewhat of a parallel path to her mother, Pleasanton Mayor Jennifer Hosterman, in her interests in community work and social service. Heather is one of three daughters of the mayor and her husband, downtown attorney Michael Hosterman. A 1999 graduate of Amador Valley High School, Heather earned dual degrees in Politics and Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz in 2003 and joined the Peace Corps soon after. Adding to her internship in Ghana while a student, she has served the Peace Corp in Bolivia and Mexico, where she is stationed now, and for a brief time was headed to Nepal, before the Corps recalled her while en route to its orientation program in Seattle because of political unrest in Nepal. Heather came home for a few days during the holidays, which is where I caught up with her to ask about her work in Ixhuatlan del CafŽ, a small community in the state of Veracruz. This is a remote coffee producing region where the women and children stay behind while the men harvest the beans in season about half the year, and then go off to Mexico City or slip into the U.S. to earn an income during the other six months.

For Heather Hosterman, it's work from sun-up to sunset, traveling among 26 communities with her local Peace Corps director to develop and make presentations at educational workshops for women and children. There they help them improve the health of their community, establish environmental safeguards to protect their homes and health, and even teach sex education to teenagers who are growing up in the state of Veracruz, which has the highest rate of HIV infections in Mexico. Last October, she helped arrange for exams of the women by a U.S. doctor, who tested about 200 for ovarian cancer, the first tests given there, with four of the women taken to local clinics for further exams.

Still, the core of Heather Hosterman's efforts involve teaching these very poor women, and even their children, about investing and saving their money, which seems somewhat far afield for Ixhuatlan families whose income is 1.5 pesos, or about 15 cents per kilo of coffee which, on a good day, might average 50 kilos. But with the men away, and the women and children even more financially desperate, Hosterman is helping them through an organization called Desarrollo Autogestionario (AUGE), which promotes self-managed development. Founded in 1997 to tackle the crisis of falling coffee prices that year, the organization has set up microcredit and savings organizations to enhance the living conditions of women in rural communities. Through training and educational workshops she conducts, Hosterman helps women recognize their talents, say sewing, and to borrow $100 or so at 2 percent interest, which is soon repaid with the profits that are also put into a savings plan. Heather finds that women who have never been empowered to earn money are even more anxious to save it whenever they can, and later to use it to grow their business and to provide health care and education for their children. She's found the adult women so receptive to the program that she's now setting up a kids' savings program in the communities she serves.

Heather also finds herself the local American emissary, invited to local events and repeatedly asked about U.S. immigration policies and how to find a job here. In Ixhuatlan, she lives with a family that includes the city's former mayor, who's astonished that Heather's mother earns just $600 a month as mayor of Pleasanton, when he earned $1,000 in his small, impoverished town.

Last month, Heather Hosterman was named one of 12 international winners of the Women for Peace Award by the Florida-based Women's Peace Power Foundation. With her Peace Corps accomplishments, business start-up acumen and plans to pursue graduate degrees in International Development and Environmental Studies, she's eyeing a career where she can help women throughout the world gain more rights and empowerment. We'll hear more about her and from her, I'm sure.

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