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