When Jacqueline Garcia Castillo held her first cohort of instructional driving classes for women in her community in 2013, none of the participants knew that she too was getting her license for the first time.
She had been living in the United States for four years, but encountered many barriers that she was determined to overcome. The intimidating process of acquiring her license and driving in a new place stopped her from driving for many years.
“Even though my father taught me how to drive when I was a teenager, when you are in a new city, in a new country, and everything is new, sometimes you can feel afraid of many things that you didn’t before,” she told The Mirror. She moved to the United States from Michoacan, Mexico, where she was a dentist.
Now she is celebrating the ten-year anniversary of her role as executive director and founder of Mujer Al Volante, a nonprofit in Federal Way that provides driving instruction for women who are refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers. Garcia Castillo said she has learned that even though “sometimes people think that in order to help others, they have to have everything. They have to have the time, they have to have the resources and I always like to say that you don’t have to wait until your life is perfect to give back.”
For her, she said she didn’t have the privilege to wait.
No matter the personal cost, Garcia Castillo worked with community members and with a small budget to ensure that she could consistently provide childcare, food and stipends for participants in her driving program. The organization now has a permanent home in Federal Way, but for many years, they held class wherever they could. At one point she taught 30-40 women in the hallway of a church.
“I didn’t have any formal resources. I was using my personal phone, I was using my own resources for the program for several years. We got small grants here and there, but we never had this formal funding. It’s something that many grassroots [organizations] face and it’s pretty difficult,” she said of her journey.
It was seven years before she received any kind of compensation for her work at Mujer Al Volante. Overall they have had 900-plus women go through the program.
For her work to uplift her community through access to the freedom of a driver’s license, she is The Mirror’s Hometown Hero for the month of October.
Garcia Castillo’s work started out of her own desire for community and education of herself. When she became pregnant, she realized that as a woman of color who is low-income, she was more vulnerable to a system that would push her to have a C-section. She wanted a home birth and wanted to educate herself on breast-feeding, attachment style parenting, nutrition and more.
“I wanted to be a professional mother,” she said and kept seeking out resources. The only problem: she couldn’t find any resources in Spanish or geared toward her community.
She started with a book in the library about meditation and other wellness practices, which led her to ask her community clinic in South Park in Seattle for a doula. There were only a few Spanish-speaking doulas in all of King County, and Garcia Castillo traveled from Snohomish all the way to South Seattle to meet with her.
As she learned, she also asked questions. Why, out of thousands of women, was she the first one to ask for a doula? Why wasn’t there information available to mothers in her community who wanted education around parenting and wellness? Her nurse and doula started sending people to Garcia Castillo so that she could share the knowledge she was gaining with them. She started holding women’s groups in her apartment around 2012.
The more she built the community of mothers, the more she started to see that lack of driver’s licenses was a huge problem in her community. To quantify the need, she conducted a survey.
“I asked them to please come if you need to get your driver’s license and like 100 women or more showed up just to fill out the survey. And I was like, oh man, I know I have to do something because now they have the expectation that I’m going to do something,” she said.
Many of the other women were like her, where they had driven in their home country, but had not been able to attain their driver’s license here. Others had never had the opportunity to drive at all or faced other barriers around literacy or confidence.
Garcia Castillo learned how to start a nonprofit the same way she learned about parenting — by seeking out information, asking questions and sharing her new knowledge with others as she learned.
She started attending every nonprofit event she could find in the community and working toward providing driving instruction to mothers in her free time. At one point she was the program manager for Villa Comunitaria and a business instructor at Highline Community College and a board president at another organization, all while running Mujer Al Volante on the side.
The program began in Seattle, but like Garcia Castillo who moved to Federal Way in 2015, many of her participants were commuting from the south. Some would take several buses just to attend her program.
Today, Mujer Al Volante has a home in Federal Way and holds their driving program in six languages. In addition to driving classes, they hold programs that provide computer skills, share opportunities for civic engagement, and soon will also provide business classes.
“At the beginning, I was like pretty focused on the Latina women, but then eventually when I started talking with other organizations, they asked me why only in Spanish?” she said. “Why not serve the the Afghan women, the Arabic speaking, the French, the many countries from Africa, and I was like, well, I don’t have the experience and they say, do it, don’t be afraid, just do it.”
Sheelan Shamdeem interpets at Mujer Al Volante and told The Mirror that she was one of the community members encouraging Garcia Castillo to expand. She is Kurdish and from Northern Iraq, and the two met years ago while working together at another nonprofit.
Of the program, Shamdeem said that it is “very important,” adding that many women depend on someone to take them places.
“When you come to America your husband is always working,” she said, and added that women need to be able to take care of things on their own, whether that is a doctor’s appointment or shopping for their family.
Garcia Castillo said she can barely grocery shop at home in Federal Way without running into someone who has attended her program. They’ll come running up to her to show her their driver’s license and to take a selfie with her and are so proud. She said these are some of her favorite moments and remind her why she does the work she has chosen.
She explained that “a driver’s license can change the life of a woman. Especially if they are mothers. Especially if they are low income. Especially if they are suffering domestic violence.”
“Many times, many women said ‘I want to leave, but I don’t know how, I have two kids, I cannot leave, I am not independent,’” Garcia Castillo said. “A driver’s licence represents the chance or opportunity for them to be independent, for them to leave an abusive relationship.”
The need is huge and Garcia Castillo said she always has a waiting list. They plan to open another location in North Seattle, but Federal Way is their main home.
Program Manager Veronica Semillo told The Mirror that she hears from women in the program how much it has helped their self-esteem. Recalling one recent student, she said that “even though in her country she was studying to become a lawyer, she had to leave everything behind to come to this country, and start anew” and that “having the ability to being in a community” as she took the classes really helped.
“I feel like, wow, this program is making such a difference, not only in the actual aspect of getting their license,” Semillo said. The aspect of confidence and self-esteem can spread and “that women will help other women or help even her own children.”
Garcia Castillo said that when she first moved to the United States over 10 years ago, she had no community. Her fear and lack of access to gaining her driver’s license was just one of many barriers she faced. Not only has she overcome many barriers of her own, she has done so by building a path for other women to do so with her.
“It was a pretty magical way to approach my own fear and to heal in community,” Garcia Castillo said. “I wasn’t alone anymore. I was creating my own community. I was sharing with other women like me.”
