Creating opportunity within the community
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While serving as a missionary in Boston, Mass., in 1994, Ernie Lopez often sparked gospel conversations with Harvard or MIT students. The young man from a tough neighborhood in San Jose, Calif., slowly began to realize something.
"I felt, whether it's true or not, that I was just as smart as they were. The only difference was that we had come from two totally different backgrounds. That was one of the experiences that helped me recognize the importance of creating opportunity — both for myself and others."
Eight years later, married with a new baby and working as an application developer for Intel in Hillsboro, Ore., he looked at the blessings opportunity had afforded him. If he could do it, he knew others from a similar background could. So he founded Red Community Services in Hillsboro, Ore., in June 2002 to provide free tutoring and mentoring for high school equivalency exams, English language skills and citizenship naturalization services.
His first board members were his wife, Maren, who served as secretary, and his mother, an immigrant from Mexico who, as a single mother, raised him. Today, there are 16 volunteers, many of whom are ward members he recruited, who assist 12 people seeking help to better their lives.
"I'm aware of the challenges the people in the community face," said the now-28-year-old member of the Dawson Creek Ward, Hillsboro Oregon Stake. "I'm aware of their circumstances in a much better way because I basically came from the same circumstances. What I'm referring to is immigration, lack of education, maybe even lack of opportunity to have an education."
In a Church News interview Brother Lopez related the forces that led him from the east side of San Jose where drugs and gangs were part of the landscape to Church membership, BYU, a mission and the 90th percentile of the Graduate Management Admission Test he passed this summer. In fact, one of the graduate schools he is applying to is Harvard.
The soft-spoken man who also serves as ward missionary with his wife recalls his best friend in first grade.That childhood friend died five years ago from the violence that Brother Lopez remembers being surrounded by, but somehow it did not permeate his life.
He credits his mother, Irasema Torres Thompkins, who still lives in San Jose and whom Brother Lopez baptized in 1994, as being the "greatest impact for good in my life." Every night, she read to him from the Bible.
By the time he met members of the Church in high school, he recognized them as "clean, friendly, fun, wholesome people, and those things set them apart from the rest." He was baptized Feb. 7, 1993.
Church membership, Brother Lopez related, "stabilized me. The keeping of commandments actually increased my motivation or may have even sparked my motivation to serve others."
These desires only intensified while he served in the Massachusetts Boston Mission, where he waited for his visa, and then in the Portugal Lisbon North Mission from 1994 to 1996. After returning home, he enrolled at BYU, becoming a student body officer and directing College Outreach, a service organization. He also dated his wife-to-be, Maren Holt; they were married in the Oakland California Temple in 1998.
After graduating in business management in 2001, he landed his current job at Intel in Oregon. But his successes only crystallized the disparity he saw in the lives around him. Some 19 percent of Hillsboro's population are Hispanic, according to U.S. Census data.
One day recently, he was driving away from the library and "saw a student walking away with his notebook in hand. This student had baggy pants and kind of a pony tail. He had just attended our ESL (English as a Second Language) class."
"I felt pretty good at that moment. I knew he was walking away a little better off."
E-mail: julied@desnews.com
