On Friday morning, United Community Center Executive Director Ricardo Diaz described President Barack Obama’s visit as a “whirlwind.”
Obama spoke at the UCC just before 2 p.m. on Thursday to congratulate the city for winning the White House’s “Healthy Communities Challenge,” which tracked Marketplace enrollment in 20 participating cities across the country to see which could make the largest gains during the open enrollment period.
Milwaukee signed up 89,000 new Marketplace plans, including 38,000 new enrollees, edging out Obama’s hometown of Chicago for the No. 1 spot.
The president spoke in the gymnasium of Bruce-Guadalupe Middle School, which is run through the UCC, before a room packed with supporters, local politicians and even the Milwaukee Bucks. UCC staff members and volunteers coordinated with White House representatives and the Secret Service before and during the event.
“This weekend, our staff, particularly Jennifer Steiner (UCC Marketing Director) and Principal Santiago Navarro (Bruce-Guadalupe Middle School) deserve all of the credit for the logistics of setting this up,” Diaz said. “We couldn’t say nicer things about the White House staff, they were true professionals in every sense of the word.”
When asked, Diaz couldn’t say for certain why his nonprofit was chosen to host Obama. He guessed it had something to do with the building’s location.
“A lot of this has to do, I assume, with logistics,” Diaz said. “Proximity, size of the room — all of those things … we played a small part in signing up people (for Obamacare) and making sure the Hispanic community had the right information.”
Over the last four decades, the UCC has transformed from a small teen outreach program called “The Spot” into a nonprofit juggernaut that serves more than 18,000 people in the Hispanic community on Milwaukee’s south side.
The Spot was opened in an old bar as an outreach program of the Milwaukee Christian Center in the late 1960s to serve as a safe place for teens to meet and hang out. But as membership grew, the Hispanic community quickly took ownership of the program and split off from the MCC to create its own organization, now known as the UCC.
The UCC offers education, cultural arts, recreation, community development, health and human services programs. It merged with Bruce-Guadalupe Middle School in the early 1990s and leases space to the nonprofit Latino Arts, a nonprofit that offers renowned art education programs.
And now, the organization has hosted a sitting president.
“I’m humbled, because so many people got to see him from this neighborhood,” Diaz said. “Milwaukee is an important city in this country. I cannot be, personally, more touched by how important this was. Our kids got pictures with him … It served us as an organization to send a message about the importance of education, the importance of working together and giving back.”
More than 90 percent of the people the organization serves are racial or ethnic minorities, and more than 40 percent live at or below the poverty line, according to its website.
“It was just really a privilege and an honor to help them put on the event,” said Steiner, the UCC’s marketing director. “We’re all kind of in shock now. It was just such an amazing experience to be a part of.”
Diaz said he was grateful for Obama’s visit.
“The president basically said to us: thank you for doing a good job,” Diaz said. “For the most important person in the world to come to your house and reaffirm what you’ve been trying to do for 46 years — it’s a very important message for our community and our staff.”
