Ana Maria Campoy (MT, ‘05) has spent the many years since graduating high school proving that the arts can make the world a better place. By bringing art into her work as an advocate and activist, Campoy has dedicated herself to serving others in her community with her own talents. She also encourages others to do the same.
Campoy has worked as a teaching artist for various organizations including Seattle Repertory Theatre, Book-It Repertory Theatre, and currently, Arts Impact, where she mentors school teachers who work in areas with large migrant populations through its Voices from the Field program. She provides teachers with the tools they need to infuse their classrooms with the arts. Through her work with Arts Impact, Campoy has become familiar with schools and rural farmworker communities across Washington State.
When the pandemic began and stay-at-home orders were announced, Campoy did not hesitate to take action to help the communities she had become so committed to. She began a mutual aid organization called WashMasks to help collect reusable masks for farmworkers and other communities to protect themselves from COVID-19.
Campoy said she set a small goal of providing 4,000 masks, beginning with 50 masks a week. She started reaching out to her community of educators, school administrators, and artists for their help, and they passionately responded.
“When you meet the communities that are feeding you, it changes you. There’s no other way to describe it—it’s an incredibly humbling experience. These farmworkers and their families take care of us. They don’t have a day off. They work in the heat, in the rain, in the snow and now in a pandemic, so the least we can do is say thank you and make sure that they are safe and protected,” Campoy said.
Campoy was able to organize and far surpass her initial goal, and the project continued to grow as volunteers joined.
Since WashMasks first began, it has provided more than 32,000 reusable masks to farmworkers and rural BIPOC communities. As the organization flourished and in partnership with many organizations and artists, WashMasks began working toward providing even more for the community.
The group started a culturally conscious food pantry; held a school supply drive in partnership with Book-It Repertory Theatre’s Education Department; collected nearly 500 inclusive books for children ages 3-18 in connection with Heart of Washington Drive; partnered with The Community for the Advancement of Family Education (CAFE) of Wenatchee, Wash. to provide farmworkers with an Art & Wellness Residency; and much more.
Recently, WashMasks and Nuestra Casa hosted a bilingual, online streaming of Proof, a Pulitzer Award-winning play by David Auburn, adapted by Campoy and Arlene Martinez-Vasquez to incorporate the barrier and connection of language, and to highlight the genius of immigrants that often goes unrecognized.
“The thing that has been really amazing this entire time, is that it’s been artists and arts educators at the core of doing all of this work and making it happen. Artists are the best collaborators. We tell stories and we inspire empathy—being an artist is reflecting humanity,” Campoy said.
Campoy said that when she and her WashMasks volunteers achieve a goal to serve, they always ask: What else can we do? Who else needs us?
As Campoy continued to learn more about rural communities and the workers, she realized the very deep connections between the worlds of art and farmworking.
“It takes years for us to develop that skill. Often people only see our product, not our process. People often don’t think we deserve to be paid very well and people don’t fully understand the effort in our work,” Campoy said.
Campoy said she attributes her strong collaborative skills, determination, and persistence that were essential to her career and WashMasks work to her time as a student at Orange County School of the Arts.
She said she believes in the communal effort to make the world a better place and to help people feel seen, heard, and appreciated.
Campoy said she remains dedicated to her career as a teaching artist and her work with WashMasks. Through the pandemic and all of her volunteer work, Campoy has learned that we need each other more, not less.