Bienestar opened the doors to it’s San Diego GLBT Latino community center three years ago, and now with the resignation of its regional director, Carolina Ramos, who is moving to The Center to manage its new Latino Services Project, there are questions arising about the future of the organization in San Diego.

“Do we have challenges? Yes we do,” said Bienestar founder Oscar De La O in an interview with the Gay & Lesbian Times this week. “Both of our staff people that we had at the center have left us and are now working for [The Center] under their Latino Project…. This is a setback because as an organization we developed staff and we developed our relationship in the community, and right now we are having to restart. But we are going to continue being very committed to San Diego.”

Nicole Murray-Ramirez, former chair of the San Diego Community Advisory Board for Bienestar, has been critical of the management of Bienestar and their handling of its San Diego center.

“I think the problem, the major problem, was that the San Diego program and center was 101-percent run by the Los Angeles office and the Los Angeles bureaucracy, and that we could not do anything without Los Angeles approval,” Murray-Ramirez said. “In fact, when we first stared negotiations for Bienestar in San Diego, they said that ‘maybe you can have an advisory board.’ Now, I had assembled Larry Baza, Teresa Oyos – I mean some really powerful leaders in our community. I said we weren’t interested in being an advisory board; we want input as San Diegans into the direction of what happens with the Latino community and services in San Diego. We are all very busy people; we already met on advisory boards so then they agreed that we would be called a ‘community board’ that would meet regularly with their board and have community input.”

According to Murray-Ramirez, there has only been one meeting with Bienestar’s board of directors, and only three members of the Los Angeles board were in attendance for that meeting.

“They promised and committed to us that there would be open communication, constant communication, and we would have input,” Murray-Ramirez continued. “Well, this never happened. In fact, we never heard from their board. I was chairman of the community board at Bienestar San Diego. I had no communication from any of the officers…. One time, one time, their board president called in three years. She would say, ‘Oh, I left a message.’ Impossible, because I never got any calls. We would constantly inform Oscar and others when they would come down of this lack of communication and how concerned we were about this.”

Current Community Advisory Board member Jess San Roque seconded Murray-Ramirez’s concerns about the lack of communications.

“It has been really difficult and I think that was one of the biggest problems,” San Roque said. “We’re hoping that Bienestar Advisory Board San Diego will have open communication between the two groups, L.A. and San Diego.”

De Le O responded to the concerns about communication and the bureaucracy, saying, “Since our main office is in L.A., the perception has been that it is L.A. That is not so; our organizational structure allows for it…. I understand perceptions and when someone would say it’s a bureaucratic organization, but the way I see our organizational structure is having our region director report to the deputy executive director; that’s fairly up there.”

Murray-Ramirez was also critical of the grant-writing efforts of Bienestar on behalf of the San Diego office, stating that a number of deadlines were missed and at one time, “I had to intercede and make sure that our grant was accepted, pleading and begging, because of Los Angeles not coming in on time.”

According to De La O, only one of the 15 grants that were applied for on behalf of San Diego Bienestar was denied because of a missed deadline.

“Of course you are hurt when you read that someone has had a bad experience with the organization you run,” De La O said. “I’m the founder of Bienestar. OK, so I take things a little bit more personal. That’s a lesson and if that’s the perception, I need to look at it and see how do we improve because, like any other organization, we have to continue to improve to ensure that we are serving our target community.”

Despite the difficulties, only one member of the San Diego Community Advisory Board has submitted a letter of resignation to De La O, and the remaining board members are expected to work with the organization as it goes through a hiring and restructuring process.

“As an advisory board, we want the best for our community here in San Diego,” San Roque said. “We were extremely happy when Bienestar wanted to open a site up here in San Diego. Now that things have changed due to a lack of funding, it’s unfortunate that Carolina resigned from Bienestar San Diego and is now with The Center.”

Bienestar operates 12 regional centers throughout Southern California, including offices in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties. Funds raised at this weekend’s San Diego Latin Pride festival go towards supporting San Diego’s Bienestar.

“We are committed to each of the communities where we have centers and insuring that the participants become our agents of change and really create the empowerment, and that they become the voices of the community; that they are the ones that are mobilized and empowered to speak on behalf of their local needs,” De La O said.