By Maura Fox
The San Diego Union-Tribune
SAN DIEGO — Sixteen young adults are on their way to becoming first responders after completing a five-month-long emergency medical services course through the County of San Diego.
The group graduated Tuesday evening from the San Diego EMS Corps, a program through San Diego County Fire and supported by local nonprofits that intends to create more accessible pathways to careers in emergency response.
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They were the first to complete the program, which began in July, and proud families and friends gathered for the ceremony at Southwestern Community College to celebrate.
“We want to see you be successful, have an outstanding career in this and make a difference in the lives of a lot of people, because you do have that opportunity,” Jeff Collins, the county fire director, told the graduates.
The five-month, five-day-a-week intensive program provides emergency medical technician training and aims to prepare young adults for jobs in emergency response positions such as EMTs, paramedics or firefighters. Designed for people age 18 to 26, it also aims to bring more diversity into the field.
Applicants are selected from more disadvantaged or underrepresented backgrounds. Each participant gets a $1,500-a-month stipend, plus wraparound services provided by SBCS, a South Bay nonprofit that offers mentorship and career development support.
For the next three months, the cohort still will get support from the organization for resume-building and completing their registration to become EMTs. “Everything we’re doing is modeling work-readiness,” said Alejandro Garcia, SBCS’s program director.
The program is funded through the state Employment Development Department and has about $1.5 million for the first three cohorts. It’s entirely grant-funded, and the county is working with nonprofits to fund it beyond next year.
The second cohort starts in January and the third next summer.
While this is San Diego’s first EMS Corps, the program began in Northern California in 2012 at a youth detention camp, designed based on feedback from participants about what tools they needed to succeed, according to the Labor and Workforce Development Agency. Since its inception, it has expanded to cities across the state.
Members of San Diego’s first class said it’s important that first responders represent the communities they serve.
“As a Black woman, especially where there’s already so much discrimination as is … it’s very encouraging,” said Kaiya Anderson Rodriguez, 21, of the EMS Corps program.
The field of first responders is heavily dominated by white men, said Jason Hums, the director of the EMT & Paramedic Program at Southwestern Community College, where the cohort took classes twice a week. He says programs like this one can show young people a career pathway that they didn’t know was possible.
There’s also a national workforce shortage for emergency services that agencies are trying to fill.
The program is one of several local efforts to train the next generation of first responders.
On Wednesday, the San Diego Workforce Partnership announced that it would be distributing nearly $4 million in state-funded grants for a separate initiative to train 250 new EMS and firefighting emergency responders, providing them stipends and wraparound services.
“The byproduct of all of this is that we live in a safer community,” said Rachel Bereza, the organization’s CEO. “The byproduct of everything is that we’ve got qualified people filling the openings that are available in our community to be able to respond to emergencies.”
EMS Corps program participants developed their life-saving skills with a mix of classroom education and hands-on learning, such as using a fully operational ambulance and human patient simulators. And they adapted to a rigorous eight-hour workday and the stresses of exams.
Evelyn Villa, 20, says the testing was the toughest part, translating the hands-on skills into taking a written exam. She plans to continue on to the fire academy early next year and ultimately hopes to serve southeastern San Diego, where she grew up, or East County, where she lives now.
The cohort’s valedictorian, Alexia Lopez, said in her speech that she couldn’t sleep the weekend before the program began in July because she was so nervous, doubting if she would succeed.
She noted that the members of the cohort all shared the desire to help people, and that some — including herself — had been shaped by their own challenges.
“For me, it started at a young age, caring for my sister when she was sick. I learned to stay calm when things felt chaotic,” Lopez said. “It gave me a deeper understanding of caring for those who can’t help themselves.”
The cohort also got to hear from Darnella Wilson, a member of Freedom House Ambulance Service, the pioneering all-Black EMT service that revolutionized the field half a century ago.
The Freedom House, which operated from 1967 to 1975 and was comprised of all Black men and women, trained emergency responders in skills that previously hadn’t been used in out-of-hospital settings, and helped set national standards for emergency medical care training.
Wilson said the EMS Corps’ graduates were like flowers that had bloomed from seeds planted in 1967, the result of hard work and fighting discrimination in an effort to help save lives.
“I was a young Black woman in a field that didn’t expect me to rise,” Wilson said. “I showed up through racism, disrespect and people quietly hoping that I would fail. But I didn’t. I rose, and you will, too.”
The San Diego EMS Corps second cohort begins on Jan. 5 , and applications for the third cohort will open in early spring.
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