Springfield nonprofit Cielo (Spanish for “sky” or “heaven”) has just been awarded a $230,000 grant by the Illinois Public Health Association. The organization, headed by Julio Barrenzuela, helps the Spanish-speaking community to stay healthy and emotionally and financially stable. The grant will allow Cielo to expand its reach by paying for staff and improvements to its offices, gathering spaces and meeting rooms, according to Barrenzuela.
Barrenzuela, 42, who was born in Peru, grew up in Springfield before joining the navy, then receiving degrees from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale and Woodbury University Burbank, California, where he received his master’s degree in Media for Social Justice. “Even though I spent a number of years away from Springfield, I always knew I would return and use my talents to help the less fortunate.”
Cielo was founded 27 years ago as a Springfield social organization by Barrenzuela’s uncle and a group of his friends. The group organized salsa dances and other activities, mostly in Mexican restaurants. The parties became fundraisers to award scholarships, usually a few hundred dollars at a time, to deserving Latino kids. The amounts were not large, but enough to put gas in the car or make the rent, enough so that a promising student wouldn’t have to drop out. Matters of organization were kept informal, but it was a small community.
When Barrenzuela came back from California with his degree in 2019, he took over Cielo and received training from SIU School of Medicine to become a community health worker. He was tasked with improving outreach to central Illinois’ Spanish-speaking community, which the school considered to be underserved. Later, he performed the same role at the Illinois Public Health Association. When COVID-19 arrived, Barrenzuela spent most of his time making sure that information about the pandemic was available in Spanish and Chuj (a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala).
Barrenzuela bought a mobile home in a park occupied almost exclusively by Spanish speakers to serve as a headquarters for Cielo and community center for the neighborhood. Volunteers cleared a lot so kids could play soccer. Two storage sheds were refurbished and converted into playhouses. The organization began to offer English classes, after-school homework assistance, and a safe space for teens to congregate. Eventually the work at Cielo became his full-time job, but the relationships he formed while at SIU exposed him to others in the community who were in a position to help Cielo help more people.
Two other members of the Cielo staff have received community health worker training. Following Illinois Community Health Worker Advisory Board guidelines, Cielo takes a holistic approach to promoting health for the people it serves, by offering activities for children after school and on the weekends such as field trips and homework assistance, driver education, budgeting and finance classes and other programs.
On Feb. 4, Barrenzuela and two staff members accompanied nearly a dozen children and adolescents to see High School Musical at the Hoogland Center, performed by local kids in middle school and high school and sponsored in part by HSHS St. John’s Children’s Hospital. Most had never been to a live stage performance in their lives.
“Many children aren’t fortunate enough to enjoy access to an event like this. My hope is that seeing this performance will spark an interest and help a child. Seeing children their age on stage made it real to them that they could do that too.” Barrenzuela said. One of the girls, perhaps 8 years old, said after the show that she wanted to be in a play herself.
Cielo is currently fitting out an examination room in the community center so that partners from SIU School of Medicine can come for regular visits with patients who find travel to a doctor to be a challenge. Cielo’s location in a neighborhood where many of its clients live will mean an increase in preventative care, which will improve health and save money.
Stable housing is another issue that Barrenzuela cares about deeply, and he believes Cielo has great potential to be a catalyst for improving the quality of housing for clients. “A lot of people are paying more for rent than they would be for a mortgage, or are living in substandard housing,” he said. Barrenzuela points out that Cielo has the financial resources to help clients transition from renters to homeowners, and trained personnel to help clients understand the financial implications of owning a home.
“Owning a home is the American dream. People who immigrate to America do so because they have a dream.”
Don Howard is an intern at the Illinois Times while pursuing a master’s degree in Public Affairs Reporting at University of Illinois Springfield. He can be reached at
This article appears in Wedding.
