Women rise in city government as well as the MLK Center

Women’s History Month is over, but women in Long Beach still have plenty to celebrate, as they rise in government and community organizations.

Andrea Gauto, 35, has been named acting executive director of the Martin Luther King Center — the first Hispanic woman to hold that post — and Cindy Rogers, 66, has been appointed Long Beach’s new deputy city manager.

“It’s no surprise that women are ascending to leadership positions in Long Beach,” Rabbi Jack Zanerhaft, spiritual leader of Temple Emanu-El of Long Beach, said earlier this week.  “It reflects what is happening across the country and the world. Gender and age make no difference.

“It’s the skill, talent and dedication that make a difference,” Zanerhaft added, “and these women exemplify that.”

Born in Ecuador, Gauto came to the United States when she was 18 and worked for a family in Howard Beach, Queens, as an au pair. She moved to Long Beach in 2018 and became a teaching assistant at West Elementary School, where she met Cederic Coad, whose family has been associated with the MLK Center for years. Coad is now MLK’s board chairman.

Coad offered Gauto a secretarial position in July 2022.  By the end of that year, she was program director. At the end of this past January, she was named acting executive director.

Gauto said her mother urged her to move to the U.S., and she has never regretted the decision. She said her passion is working with children, and she has a variety of plans for the center going forward.

For starters, she would like to bring in a counseling team to work with children from broken homes. “There are a number of children who are orphans” and they could benefit from counselors, she said. She hopes one day herself to become a child psychologist.

Gauto also wants to start a satellite school at the center, so children can study various trades without having to pay bus fare to travel to trade schools in Hempstead. “The Long Island Railroad is expensive and so are the buses, and the kids don’t have the money,” Gauto said.

Gauto said she plans to invite union officials to the center to talk to the kids about how to become electricians, plumbers or other trades people. She wants to enhance current academic and anti-drug programs, and she would like to start offering programs for senior citizens. “I know they like to go to Atlantic City,” she said.

She has an idea to start a re-entry program for people recently released from prison, in hopes of reducing the country’s high recidivism rate,

Gauto has reached out to Zanerhaft and to Helen Dorado Alessi, president of the Long Beach Latino Civic Association, among others, to plan a food festival at the center late this spring. Jewish, Latino, Indian and other dishes would be available, she said.

The festival, she said, would be another way to bring a sometimes-divided world together.

“I am very confident all of this can happen,” Gauto said.

Rogers, who grew up in Delaware in an Air Force family, has a lengthy history in government.  She worked for former U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi as his district director, overseeing his offices in Huntington and Douglaston, Queens, from 2017 until he left Congress last year to run unsuccessfully for governor. Earlier, Rogers was a deputy commissioner at the Nassau County Planning Department.

Rogers graduated from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and worked as an intern for Joe Biden when he was the junior senator from Delaware. She was later a staff attorney for U.S. Senator J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana. She got married and moved to New Hyde Park and now lives in Glen Cove.

“There’s always more room for women in government,” Rogers said. “Women have a lot to bring to the table.”

Dorado Alessi, who has been in the forefront of advocating for the rights of women,  said, “I think the climate in Long Beach is perfectly aligned for the promotion of women, Times are changing.” There now are three women on the City Council, she said, referring to Karen McInnis, Tina Posterli, and Liz Treston.

“We have made progress, but we have a long way to go,” Dorado Alessi said. “We still have to get pay parity” for many women.