Centreville Couple Win Award for Work on Immigration, Community Issues

They were a typical Centreville couple heading toward retirement—he was a founding pastor of a local church and she was a history teacher—when a wave of passion erupted in the community, threatening to tear through it. 

Much of the anger was directed at who gathered near the , which operated as a focal point for employers who picked up the men along the street. Mindful of how those passions have played out in Prince William County, Jerry and Alice Foltz figured the best thing to do was to get everybody get together in one room and talk about it. 

“We just figured that there had to be a better way to break the tension and to deal with things on a rational level,” said Alice Foltz. “We just didn’t want things to get worse.” 

Those discussions, which started in a tiny meeting room at the library, evolved into the Centreville Immigration Forum in 2007. Alice and Jerry brought in an expert conflict mediator from their church, the , and sponsored periodic talks about the issues of assimilation and immigration. 

The meetings could get heated and it wasn’t like everybody sat around the punchbowl singing Kumbaya. “It seemed to help to get everybody’s feeling out and after a while the angry folks stopped coming we got a core group that wanted to do something about the immigration issue,” Alice said. 

For their work with the forum, the couple was recently awarded with the . They were happy with the honor, but said their work isn’t done. 

After all the years of talking, the two and the forum members decided to take a more active role and help address the situation by creating a hiring center that would house the workers while they were waiting for jobs—getting them off the street.   

It has been in the planning stage for more than a year, but the center will probably open in the next month or so, Alice said. It is privately funded and will receive no public money, unlike other day labor centers. It will be located in a permanent facility donated by developer Albert J. Dwoskin, who owns the Centreville Square Shopping Center, Alice said. She anticipates about 40-60 workers a day will use the center; about a total of 100-150 day laborers—who are drawn from the same impoverished, rural section of Guatemala—will sign up to use the facility.

However the creation of the center, has been met with criticism from those who question the wisdom of helping immigrants of uncertain legal status. 

But, a discussion of whether the laborers have a right to work in this country misses the point, the couple said. 

“We are not trying to solve a national problem,” Alice said. “We are just trying to solve a local issue of putting up a place that’s safe for both the workers and the people who want to hire them."

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