Madeline Nieto Hope has worked hard for years to make Western Weekend reflect all West Marin, both old-timers and newcomers, Anglos and Latinos. This year, as the grand marshal of the festival’s 75th parade, she hopes the events will celebrate the area’s ranching roots from both the rancher and ranchhand perspectives.
“We wanted Western Weekend to reflect both the ranch-owner experience and to lift up our Latino workforce,” said Madeline, who is of both Latin and Eastern European heritage. “We wanted to balance the long-term narrative that we’re very familiar with in terms of the agricultural roots of the community.”
Latinos have been a crucial part of the workforce for as long as West Marin’s ranches have been around. But their presence in the annual celebration has not always been as great as their contributions on the farm—and throughout the community. That has begun to change in recent years, as Madeline and other organizers have sought to raise their profile and make the event more inclusive.
The grand marshal title comes in recognition of Madeline’s extensive community service, which has focused on youth, environmental protection, arts and food security. She is perhaps best known as the director the Tomales Bay Youth Center, which she helped establish and ran for 13 years before leaving last fall.
“Not having a dedicated space for youth where services and resources are clustered was an obvious omission in coastal West Marin,” she said. “It was at that age—middle school and high school—where my own life went sideways. I didn’t want that for our young people.”
When Madeline was just 7 years old, her father was murdered by an angry man with a gun. She grew up without knowing much about him and moving back and forth between Pasadena, where her mother lived, and Canada, where she and her sister stayed with relatives.
Her mother’s family emigrated from Russia to Canada, and her dad was of Mexican and Indigenous descent. “I use the name ‘Nieto’ because it’s one of the only ways I have to honor my father,” she said.
It wasn’t until recently that she learned he had once worked with teens as a guidance counselor.
Madeline began advocating for a local youth center after serving a term on the Shoreline Unified School District board. “I was seen as the tree-hugger, hippie kind of board member,” she laughed. “I was the one to bring a reusable water bottle to our meetings.”
Speaking outside Toby’s Feed Barn on a recent afternoon, Madeline wore a black brimmed hat and a blue peasant blouse that reinforced the hippie vibe. She spoke earnestly and intensely of her decades of work on behalf of social causes on the coast.
During her tenure on the school board, Shoreline established a wellness program to ensure all students, regardless of income, received nutritious meals and physical education opportunities. Such programs are required of school districts participating in the federal school lunch program.
When her term expired in 2009, Madeline saw the youth center as an extension of the district’s commitment to keeping every child healthy and safe. She persuaded the Lions Club to finance the project, which required renovating a building at West Marin School that had been slated for demolition.
“She saw the building, she saw the opportunity, and she worked on it,” said Angelo Sacheli, co-president of the West Marin Lions Club, which co-sponsors Western Weekend with the Rotary Club, the West Marin-Olema 4-H Club, KWMR, the Marin County Farm Bureau and other community groups. “She has a lot of integrity, and she’s an incredibly hard worker.”
Mr. Sacheli said that when the idea was first proposed, there was some resistance to establishing a center for teens—which some people associated with trouble. “It was like we were building a center for Al-Qaeda,” he joked.
Thanks to Madeline’s persistence, the Lions Club gave the project its full backing. So far, the club has contributed $579,000 to the center, whose operations were taken over by West Marin Community Services in 2021. “She really wanted kids to have a connected space, somewhere they could do things that were productive,” said Annika Parmar, a Tomales High junior who has worked as an intern at the center. “She sensed that certain kids don’t have assets, and she was always there to provide whatever they needed to thrive. She was always ready to lend time or money to a student in need.”
Like Madeline, some of the teens who spent time at the center were mixed race. Her time with them helped her work through her own complex feelings about racial identity, and advocating for them helped her embrace both sides of herself.
“My whole life I worked very hard at wanting to be an integrated person with an identity that bridged the two contrasting worlds my parents came from,” she said. “I wanted to be proud of being mixed race, and simultaneously I was always uncomfortable being mixed race, not belonging to one ethnic group. I’ve learned how to be okay with being in the middle.”
Many of the projects the students engaged in focused on the environment, including the Recycle Circus, a major community event Madeline organized in her county-funded role as West Marin’s zero waste watchdog. The free materials exchange offered people a chance to donate or pick up reusable items.
The event grew so popular that it had to be discontinued due to the logistical challenge of too many donations. Chloe Cook, program manager of the of the West Marin Multi-Services Center, said the event will likely resume this year, perhaps on a smaller scale at various locations instead of one central spot in Point Reyes Station.
“Madeline at heart is a community organizer,” Ms. Cook said. “She is acutely aware of the social and emotional needs of West Marin. She’s been doing community service work here for 30 years. She’s amazing.”
In addition to her work with youth, Madeline has helped organize efforts to provide healthy meals to senior citizens at Walnut Place. She is a co-chair of West Marin Food Systems, which works to eliminate food waste and promote climate-friendly agricultural practices.
Madeline began her career as an artist, earning fine arts degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Parsons School of Design, where she studied textiles and sculpture. She and her husband, John Hope, operated an art gallery in San Francisco before moving to Inverness, where his family had a home. The parents of two grown children—one son and one daughter—they have lived here since 1996.
Toward the end of her tenure at the youth center, Madeline went back to school and earned a master’s degree, aiming to strengthen her credentials for administering public programs. She hadn’t intended to part ways from the youth center, and her sudden departure has been a disruption, she said.
She is continuing to work as a consultant, focusing on environmental and food security issues. And she will continue making art, using found and recycled materials to produce sculpture. Madeline said her creative work helps her make sense of the world, and she sees a common thread between her art and community-service efforts.
“The process of joining, bridging and collaborating, and co-creation is how I feel most at home in the community,” she said. “My work aspires to help others make sense of the world and understand more clearly how to access the resources and services that help us all survive.”
Gilberto Rodriguez, a maintenance worker at West Marin and Inverness Schools, appreciates Madeline’s efforts at community building. About six years ago, when the sponsors of Western Weekend began considering ways to make the event more inclusive, Madeline invited him to help provide food at the event.
For several years, Latino chefs had sold tacos at the commons at one end of main street while the farm bureau put on the big chicken barbecue down the street at Toby’s Feed Barn. Madeline and her colleagues at the Lions Club decided to bring the events together at Toby’s, where Mr. Rodriguez and his wife, Aracely, who’s cooked meals for West Marin and Inverness schools for 18 years, served up tacos.
“Madeline has always tried to bring the Anglo and Latino people together,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “If there’s ever a conflict, she’s trying to find a solution. To me, she’s one of the best people in Point Reyes.”