Annalivia Palazzo-Angulo

Annalivia Palazzo-Angulo with husband Eduardo and daugherSocial Justice Fund member Annalivia Palazzo-Angulo has a Masters degree, and is also a tenth-grade dropout. She’s the program director of the Salem Keizer Coalition for Equality, where her struggle with the school system as a young person helps her connect to students and parents who are working for educational equality. Like many Social Justice Fund members, her commitment to justice comes from her life experience.

“At 16, I was getting great grades but living in poverty,” recalls Annalivia. “People don’t understand that for kids in poverty, everything is one day at a time, you don’t think about your future. There was no motivation, no dream that I was going to college. I wasn’t expected to do anything with my life except for get married and have kids. I dropped out of school and got engaged at 16, then got married.”

Annalivia’s siblings also dropped out, and she has a clear sense now that the problem was with the school system and dysfunctional lives due to poverty, not with their intelligence.

“My brother was getting F’s in school but then coming home and reading the encyclopedia. My sister got good grades, but she was terrified to speak in school. She finally dropped out.”

When her children were born, she wanted to offer them a better experience. She taught them as much as she could at home, including reading and math. They were clearly bright, but still struggled in school. As her kids got older, Annalivia decided to become a teacher.

Annalivia entered Chemeketa Community college, started winning scholarships, and found “a new breath of life.” She went on to Willamette University in Salem on a scholarship, becoming an honors student studying history and language. “I studied Ebonics, the civil rights movement, and English as a Second Language. And I got involved with everything on campus that had to do with civil rights or women’s rights.” She related to the experience of being marginalized – as an Italian child, she had often been called racist slurs that referred to Italians (and also Latinos). “As a child, I didn’t know what most of those words meant,” she says.

Educational equality became her passion as she continued on for her Masters in teaching. In 1999, there was an uproar in Salem around racial profiling, suspension rates and dropout rates for youth of color. Groups on the Willamette University campus joined with other organizations addressing the issue, and Annalivia found a new calling.

“I was interested in combining social justice work with education. My interest wasn’t just in the marches, but how we could get these kids through school and how they could succeed. I wanted to combine what I knew about language equality issues with broader social justice.”

Through this work, Annalivia met her current husband, Eduardo, and together they built the Salem-Keizer Coalition for Equality. The coalition showed that Black and Latino youth in the school district were disproportionately suspended, contributing to higher dropout rates for youth of color.

Since then, the Salem-Keizer Coalition for Equality – a Social Justice grantee – has organized hundreds of parents and kids who have successfully lobbied for over a million dollars for educational programs that serve their local community. Annalivia and her husband became members in 2005, and have helped with fundraising.

“Being a member isn’t just about what’s in our bank account,” says Annalivia. “We’re at a basic member level because we don’t have much money, but it’s important to our family, to our community and to our movement.”