Community Organizing 101 by Cecilia Flores

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING101

BY CECILIA FLORES

In the fall of 2016, after many years in ministry with Catholic youth and young adults, I started a new role as director of a Newman Center in California and was tasked with growing a budding ministry at a highly diverse public commuter university. As I planned for the upcoming academic year with our staff and student leadership team, our events calendar quickly filled with student Masses, social events, faith formation studies, and the numerous other activities common to this age group.

As the weeks trudged on, however, I became aware of other realities the students were facing that felt important to address, such as food and housing insecurity. As I turned to colleagues in the university campus ministry field, I was disappointed that I couldn’t find others working on addressing these issues. I ultimately decided in the spirit of “cura personalis”—whole person care—that it was part of my mission to serve these students’ physiological needs as well as their spiritual ones. This led to collaboration with a local St. Vincent de Paul Society chapter to fund and create a student food pantry, as well as a collaboration with the university social worker to find ways our center could support unhoused students. That fall, it started to become evident that despite being hired to be an expert and leader in pastoring these students, my years of experience in ministry did not prepare me to accompany them through the urgent issues that kept them up at night.

On September 5, 2017, the Trump administration announced that it would be rescinding Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a policy that grants certain people who came to the United States as children temporary permission to stay and work in the country.1 After a year of growing in relationship with these students, I knew that this announcement would have a detrimental effect on the lives of many in our community, and I knew that not addressing it and serving them in that need would be a failure in my pastoral care to them. However, once again I found myself without resources to address this urgent issue from within my campus ministry network. It was then that I turned to a friend who was a faith-based community organizer and asked her to work with our students, not knowing completely what that meant.

Accept/uses

Community Organizing: Spectrum

Homeless shelters

Trash clean-up

What Is Community Organizing?

There are several ways an individual can engage in work for social change. Most people are likely familiar with direct service, in which one (person, organization, etc.) fulfills the needs of another. Another familiar method of engagement is advocacy, in which an individual or group speaks and acts on behalf of another.

While advocacy can certainly be an effective mechanism for creating change on behalf of impacted communities, the goal of community organizing is to accompany impacted communities as they become agents of change and to bring solutions to the problems they themselves are living.

Faith-Based Community Organizing Cycle

Celebration & Evaluation

(De-brief, Report back, Next steps)

Action & Mobilization

(Outreach, Personal invitation, Execution)

Listening & Relationship Building

(1:1s, House meetings)

Relationship & Faith

Research (Movement alignment, Research meetings, Social analysis, Theological analysis)

The work of faith-based community organizing is rooted in relationship and faith. This takes place in four main steps:

1) Listening and relationship building

2) Research

3) Action and mobilization

1 “Key Facts on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA),” KFF, last modified April 26, 2023, https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-andhealth-policy/fact-sheet/key-facts-on-deferred-action-for-childhoodarrivals-daca/

4) Celebration and evaluation

These steps can happen in a cycle, but they can also happen simultaneously. Because congregations and other faith-based

of Demand for Change Challenges existing power relationship

Direct Action

groups are brought together by their commitment to shared beliefs and values, organizing in faith spaces can bring those shared values to life and deepen members’ commitment to the community.

A common way to initiate an organizing cycle within a community is to conduct a listening campaign. A listening campaign is an “intentional effort by a local organizing committee to reach out and listen to a certain number of people in the congregation within a defined period of time.” 2 This listening is done primarily in one-to-one meetings, face-to-face conversations, with the purpose of discovering someone’s selfinterest. Through listening campaigns, an organizer can build and strengthen relationships and identify key problems facing the community.

Once problems are identified, the next phase of the cycle is to engage in research, which in this context is an “intentional process carried out by community leaders, with the goal of defining a specific, resolvable issue within a larger problem.” 3 In this phase, leaders seek to better understand the problem from multiple perspectives, build relationships in order to learn from others working on the problem, explore possible solutions, and identify individuals with authority or power to influence the issue at hand.

After conducting research, those involved then decide what action to undertake and define strategies to mobilize the community to partake in this action. This can take on many forms, such as a press conference, a public action, or gathering signatures for a petition to take to elected officials. Action and mobilization is an important step in the cycle: Well-known community organizer Saul Alinsky said that action is the oxygen of organizing. Taking collective action breathes new life into our movements and efforts, strengthens the bonds of community, and helps move us from private shame to public pain and further collective action for change.

2. “A Day in the Life of a Faith In Action Organizer,” Faith in Action, accessed June 128, 2023, https://organizingcareers.org/day-in-thelife-faith-in-action-organizer/.

3. Ibid.

In the last step of the organizing cycle, celebration and evaluation, we’re given an opportunity to reflect on what has taken place both individually and collectively. This is an important step in the cycle, as it is seen as a safe space for learning and development. Through reflection and evaluation of what we have learned and accomplished up to this point, we can continue to grow in our leadership capacity and refine our strategies.

Organizing as Subsidiarity

In the context of Catholic social teaching, community organizing can be considered a method of embodying subsidiarity. The principle of subsidiarity, as defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is a “teaching according to which a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.” 4

In this case, “higher order” and “lower order” can refer to levels of government or authority. For example, a state government could be considered to be higher order, while a local school could be considered lower order. Because the local school is of lower order, subsidiarity would encourage the school and all of those who are part of it to be responsible for decisions that affect its internal life.

Community organizing enables subsidiarity by creating a pathway for people closest to the pain to define their own solutions, instead of solutions being dictated through a topdown approach. It invites community members to be agents of change over their daily lives and to interact with government and authority in a way that empowers them to hold those in authority accountable to their needs and desires. ***

From my experience within a campus ministry context, community organizing helped to enhance my ability to serve the student community. It taught me that, despite being an “expert” in the field of youth and young adult ministry, any person I am called to serve is in fact the only expert of their lived experience. My role is to accompany them as they seek to understand their communities and their role within them. The skills and postures that I learned from organizing have made me a more effective pastoral minister, helping me to embody true accompaniment and solidarity.

Cecilia Flores is the daughter of Filipino immigrants and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds a master’s degree in global development and social justice from St. John’s University and currently works as a community organizer and narrative strategist with Sacramento ACT. She is the host and producer of IPJC’s Justice Rising podcast.

4. John, Paul II. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2011. https://www.usccb. org/sites/default/files/flipbooks/catechism/

Advocacy Speaking with people in power on behalf of a community

Speaking with people in power on behalf of self

Adapted from a graphic by Meredith Begin