Q&A with ALFI Faculty Melissa Cerezo

Melissa Cerezo is an urban planner by training and bridge builder by heart. In her current role as Transit-Oriented Communities Principal Planner for The Valley Transportation Agency (VTA), Melissa helps to implement the organization's vision for thriving, equitable, prosperous, and well-connected communities. Melissa Cerezo is also an ALF Senior Fellow from Class XXXVIII and Co-Facilitator for ALF's AAPI affinity group. Melissa is an ALF Insights faculty member who was instrumental in forming ALFI's latest strategic plan. We talked via Zoom about the benefits of good facilitation and leveraging vulnerability to create change.

Demone Carter: Can you talk about some of the work you are doing with ALF?

Melissa Cerezo: I work mostly in the affinity group space. These are really specific intersectional identity-based affinity groups where various issues and questions will come up. And there's a need for these conversations not just to happen organically; we need to set up a structure and a stage for folks to engage in relationships. To engage with care and mindfulness. That is the sort of frame that I try to enter into when I do this work in those affinity spaces.

What's been one of the best outcomes that have come out of your time facilitating the BIPOC affinity groups? 

A measure of success in those spaces is realness and vulnerability, right? If you can get engagement where people are beginning to step into that edge of discomfort, to say, "I actually don't know how to be in solidarity across diverse genders," Not to say that someone has spoken those exact words, but when people start to admit their fears, it's always inspiring and makes other folks reflective. I also think part of the frame I work within is that everyone has an individual contribution to make within a group dialogue. Really, it's about moving a community forward. What occurs when stories and vulnerability are witnessed together reshapes how people begin to evolve individually. Then the hope is that there's a real domino effect on their careers, the choices they're making behind the desk, at the table, or out in public.

We've started to scratch the surface of how we show solidarity with each other across racial and ethnic differences. That solidarity is much harder to achieve than just like, oh, we all decided to come together; we all look different.

But I get the sense that you (joined ALF Insights) even before you ever experienced some background in facilitation. Is that correct?

Before my ALF experience, I wouldn't say that. I've always been a bridge builder in my experience as an urban planner. I think that my facilitation practice really jumped off when I was trying to seed equity work at VTA. To bring us together around common goals and strategic purposes. I was coming out of one year of my Government Alliance On Racial Equity experience. That was a very challenging space for me to cut my teeth in facilitation. Then, several months after that, I think that's when I joined Insights.

As an urban planner, do you feel like you had some skill sets that you brought to your facilitation and vice versa? How has your training as a facilitator changed the way you do your urban planning work? 

Yeah, the process of being an urban planner and trying to uplift community power and community voice inevitably involves facilitation to ensure that you have shared goals, shared understanding, and shared language around your purpose. So, it was natural that I was drawn to that aspect of the work. Now, having done extensive facilitation, whether it's in the VTA equity space or with ALF, it's all bearing out. I'm working on a community-based planning project with the Five Wounds Urban Village in collaboration with the city of San Jose. Because in that space, we are a collective of predominantly government folks who are working across differences and working across agency differences. I'm always having to situate folks like, Okay, well, we have separate cultures, we have separate dynamics. There's a lot of talking, pausing, and recognizing that multiple truths can happen, which I think is very much a facilitation concept. 

What do you do to unwind? 

I have a young family, and they're the center of my life. I cherish relationships and work, but my most cherished relationships are with my family. I have two kids, ages two and six. With so much going on, it's easy to be a busy person and not be present. I'm really trying to be present. Engage in silliness, kick that ball, throw it longer than I want to (laughs) Because it means connection.