By Guadalupe Bellavance (Alianza News)San Jose, CA – Despite the terrible economic crisis and the lost of his home, Enrique S. Flores launched this month a remodel website of East Side Heroes (ESH). Now the public can learn and read about the different programs of the non-profit organization that provides scholarship, mentoring, and support to low-income and at-risk Latino students and their families.
In the last year, several organizations who used to donate a lot of money gave less to East Side Heroes making impossible to give out scholarships this year. However, those barriers didn’t stop the founder and announced www.weastsideheroes.org/new because “I wanted to show more pictures and videos of the students that we are serving and programs that we are offering with the help of YWCA which allow us to support high schools students in four different schools”, emphasized Flores who is now renting an apartment with his family.

This year, the YWCA of Silicon Valley adopted the East Side Heroes’ Mentoring Style to serve over 400 high school students within its “Project Inspire” After School Program at James Lick High School, Overfelt High School, Yerba Buena High School, and Andrew Hill High School in San Jose.

Right now, “around 140 students are using this services daily”, added Flores.

In the past Flores, 30 years, would go and search for potential students who wanted to continue their education. He will talk to them about the possibility of attending a private high school and going to college. Today, they call him and ask for help.

Others programs of community services that East Side Heroes recently did were Adopt a Family, Help to Daily Workers, and Socks and Caps.

For this coming Christmas, “15 families of East San Jose received help with cloths, food, and gifts. We are also providing sandwiches of peanut butter and jelly, fruit, and water to 150 daily workers, and provided them with socks and hats, all in East San Jose”, said Flores the son of Mexican immigrants.

East Side Heroes was founded by Enrique Flores in 2003. His mission is to improve the quality of life of at-risk youth, young adults, and low income families. However, the community services such as Adopt a Family “I started since 2001. Later I taught how to keep running these programs to the students and community. Today they are the ones who are doing the sandwiches, and giving them to the workers, and donating and collecting money” for these programs, added proudly Flores.

Flores declared a miracle that ESH is still alive. Each year is a new beginning, “we start with zero money, and in 2009 we only collected $ 20,000”, said Flores. For that reason this year were not able to provide new scholarships. But Flores hopes to do it next year by raising money during the 7^th Annual East Side Heroes’ Student Achievement Banquet. In the first five years of ESH, the non-profit organization was able to rise over $125,000.00.

According the website, 98% of the donations received went directly to cover tuition costs of low-income students, “and 2% went directly to basic operations cost such as maintaining the ESH’s website”, said Flores.

Remembering his own personal problems such as loosing his home in this recent crisis, Flores acknowledged that his hero is Cesar Chavez. Despite Chavez also being poor man, he fought the rights and better working conditions of the farm workers in California. The sample of this brave man, keeps Flores working hard and involving more and more people to help the students to pursue a dream of a better education and creating among them the leadership that they will need tomorrow.

Currently, East Side Heroes has seven students attending and achieving academic success at Notre Dame High School, Bellarmine College Preparatory, and Archbishop Mitty High School.

Enrique Flores is the son of Mexican immigrants -who came to this country searching a better life-, was raised in East San Jose. He received a scholarship from the Jesuit Community allowing him to graduate from Bellarmine College Preparatory in 1997. Flores earned both his Bachelor of Science Degree in Sociology (2001) and a Masters in Counseling with an emphasis in Correctional Psychology (2006) from Santa Clara University with the help of scholarships.

At age 20, Flore completed his first autobiographical book entitled From E.S.S.J., to S.C.U. and Back. Now he is working on his second manuscript that he hopes to finish one day.  

Currently, Enrique serves as the Director of Youth Services for the YWCA of Silicon Valley and is also a substitute “Substance Abuse” teacher for Milpitas Adult Education at the Elmwood Correctional Facility.