SOMOS Mayfair: Turning Lived Experience into Leadership and Leadership into Change

For SOMOS Mayfair, lasting community change begins with the people who live there.

Rooted in East San José’s historic Mayfair neighborhood, SOMOS Mayfair works to ensure residents can not only stay in their community but thrive there. It’s a meaningful goal in a neighborhood where residents once used the expression Sal Si Puedes—“get out if you can”—to describe the challenges of living in a community shaped by underinvestment, discrimination, poor infrastructure, and limited opportunity. Today, rising housing costs and displacement present a different challenge: ensuring longtime residents have the opportunity to remain and build a future in the community they helped create.

Through community organizing, leadership development, early education, and economic opportunity, SOMOS helps residents turn their lived experiences into leadership—and their leadership into change.

At the heart of that work is a simple principle: residents closest to the challenges should have the power to help shape the solutions.

For Co-Executive Director Saúl Ramos, SOMOS Mayfair’s role is to create the conditions for residents to turn their knowledge and experience into action. Leadership development is at the center of the organization’s model, helping residents identify priorities, advocate for their families and neighbors, and gain greater influence over the decisions that shape their community. By cultivating leadership from within East San José, SOMOS is building community power that can continue to grow and strengthen over time.

That approach has shaped efforts ranging from organizing parents to strengthen connections with local schools to advancing tenant protections, cooperative housing, worker-owned cooperatives, and pathways to greater economic opportunity.

Ramos points to Dilza as an example of the leadership that already exists within Mayfair—and what can happen when it is recognized and nurtured. SOMOS first met her by knocking on her door when she was 19, raising three young children and navigating an autism diagnosis for one of them. Undocumented at the time, she had been told that she would never have access to the same opportunities for success as others. Through her involvement with SOMOS, she began organizing and advocating not only for her own family, but for others in her community. Today, she leads organizing efforts for a San José nonprofit, helping families and residents navigate many of the same barriers she once faced herself.

“SOMOS saw power in me before I could see it in myself. My journey through SOMOS taught me that people power is not just about lifting ourselves up, its about reaching back, opening doors, having a voice at the table, and making sure others know their power too.”—Dilza, former SOMOS Mayfair Promotora and former staff member

For Ramos, her journey captures what SOMOS hopes to accomplish: “Seeing her develop into a leader in San José, leading a powerful organization, that is what we are hoping to accomplish—and shifting the outcomes and opportunities for her children, for an entire generation.”

That community-centered approach has become particularly important as immigrant families face growing uncertainty and fear. SOMOS Mayfair is an ally of the Rapid Response Network, providing trusted, neighborhood-level support during periods of heightened immigration enforcement.

When these concerns intensified in 2025, Sobrato Philanthropies moved quickly to provide funding that helped SOMOS train Promotoras to work directly with families. They help residents prepare for the possibility of detention or separation by identifying who could care for children, organizing legal and medical information, and ensuring critical documents are accessible.

Because Promotoras are trusted members of the community, those relationships often reveal needs beyond emergency planning, from medical care to missed housing payments. SOMOS can then help connect families with city, county, and nonprofit resources. Ramos says Sobrato Philanthropies’ initial investment also helped create opportunities to sustain the work through other partnerships.

The partnership reflects a broader alignment between SOMOS Mayfair and Sobrato Philanthropies. As Ramos explains, SOMOS is working not only to support individuals and multigenerational families, but to “build ecosystems and change ecosystems as a whole.” By investing in resident leadership alongside immediate needs, SOMOS helps communities build the relationships, resources, and influence needed to create change that lasts.

“What makes SOMOS Mayfair extraordinary is its refusal to treat families’ lives as a series of separate challenges. Housing, education, immigration, economic opportunity—they’re all connected, and SOMOS meets people where they are and builds from their assets—ingenuity, leadership, and culture. I am proud to have worked alongside the residents of Mayfair, and it’s this kind of community-rooted, systemic work that Sobrato Philanthropies is proud to stand behind.”—Camille Llanes-Fontanilla, Senior Vice President, Community Impact & Systems Change, Sobrato Philanthropies, and former Executive Director of SOMOS Mayfair

For Ramos, the greatest source of hope remains Mayfair’s people themselves. “Even though people are the most impacted, people are the ones that provide the most hope.”

SOMOS Mayfair, along with the Sí Se Puede Collective, is now building on that power by developing a Community Development Corporation—the Mayfair Neighborhood Trust—designed to give residents an even greater voice in shaping what gets built in their neighborhood. It’s another step toward a future in which the people of Mayfair aren’t simply affected by decisions about their community—they have the power to help make them.