Church Groups Prove They Can Fight City Hall

The building of People’s Organizations is orderly revolution; it is the process of the people gradually but irrevocably taking their places as citizens of a democracy. --Saul D. Alinsky,in “Reveille for Radicals,” 1949.

Melvin Davis was not going to let the deputy police chief off easily.

As one of three panel members at a recent parish and community meeting at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, Davis asked Santa Ana’s deputy chief of police, Eugene Hansen, what he was going to do to improve police protection in the south Santa Ana neighborhood.

“You must be patient,” said Hansen, explaining that the police force was short more than 30 officers and had a whole city, not just one neighborhood, to patrol. “We’re stretching as fast as we can.”

So Davis asked again, this time trying to pin the chief down: “While we must be patient, you have people who are afraid of being attacked. When do you feel you’ll have the officers that you need?”

Asking for Solutions

Maybe by the end of 1987, Hansen said. Not quite a firm commitment, but Davis had made his point, and he had done it in front of 300 neighborhood residents who had crowded into the church meeting hall: until the police beefed up its force and responded to emergency calls more quickly, the community would feel shortchanged.

During the last six months, similar scenes have been repeated in different parts of the county, as organized, well-trained church groups, sometimes backed by hundreds of neighborhood residents and parish members, have confronted city officials with their problems--and pointedly asked for solutions.

In some cases, at least, they have gotten them:

- At St. Boniface Catholic Church in Anaheim, parishioners pressured the city’s recreation director and the city council into improving lighting and increasing patrols at Pearson Park, a local haven for drug traffickers and drunks.

- At St. Anthony Claret church, also in Anaheim, a group persuaded city traffic engineers to divert a planned truck route that would have brought semi-tractor-trailer rigs down La Palma Avenue, past a school crossing and through residential neighborhoods.

- In Santa Ana, after listening to demands by a parish community organization at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, City Manager Dave Ream took steps to clean up a city-owned storage yard and reduce truck traffic that the group’s members felt was dangerous.

- Two weeks before the meeting at Immaculate Heart of Mary, Chief Hansen faced a similarly large and determined crowd at Our Lady of the Pillar Church, also in Santa Ana. At both meetings, residents presented Hansen with lists of addresses where they believed drugs were being sold. Hansen said he would have the houses checked out.

So far, the church groups have been content to fight small battles, usually asking for things that they have a reasonably good chance of obtaining if they apply enough pressure.

Laying Groundwork

But they are laying the groundwork for something much more far-reaching than a traffic light or spruced-up park, says Sister Armida Deck, president of the Orange County Sponsoring Committee, the umbrella organization that has spawned the smaller groups.

“We want to give a voice to the voiceless,” Deck said. “We want to enable people to empower themselves. . . . There is a lot of structural oppression out there.”

The Sponsoring Committee encourages communities to identify their own leaders and issues, Deck said, rather than imposing its own agenda from above. But, she added, some broad, basic issues some groups might look at down the line include the preservation of low-cost housing, jobs and the quality of education in local schools.

The growth of the church groups in the past year signals a rebirth for the Sponsoring Committee, which had been quiet since it made headlines in the 1970s and early ‘80s by bringing confrontational--and often controversial--organizing strategies and tactics to Orange County.

Team of 4 Priests

Business and church leaders, recognizing a need to organize the county’s poorer neighborhoods, formed the Sponsoring Committee in 1976. A team of four Jesuit priests from the Oakland Training Institute, a nonprofit community organizing group with whom the committee contracted, and three lay people started the project by going door to door in Santa Ana, searching for issues that would galvanize the neighborhoods.

The organizers’ training methods and strategies were--and still are--rooted in the teachings of Saul D. Alinsky, whose Back of the Yards Council in Chicago in the 1930s became the prototype for activist community organizations around the country, said the Rev. Mike Mandala, one of the original organizers from Oakland.

Out of the organizers’ legwork grew several small groups from neighborhoods such as Logan, Santa Anita and Artesia Pilar, which banded together to form a coalition called the Santa Ana Neighborhood Organizations (SANO).

SANO’s tactics included storming City Council meetings and politicians’ offices--sometimes with jars of cockroaches--to demand improvements in neighborhoods that had no sidewalks, paved streets or storm gutters. On one occasion, SANO members infuriated Police Chief Raymond C. Davis by gathering at his house after the chief had canceled a meeting with them and complaining to his neighbors about his uncooperativeness.

By 1980, the Jesuit priests had moved on. Some of SANO’s member groups were by then strong and well-organized--Barrio Logan, for example, remains an effective organization today. But the Sponsoring Committee had funding problems and difficulty finding strong leadership, according to members of the committee.

Drawing on the Parish

About two years ago, the Sponsoring Committee set out on a new tack. Instead of going into neighborhoods cold and trying to start an organization by knocking on doors, the committee’s organizers would enlist the help of local churches, drawing on the parish as an established support base.

To give the organizers added credibility when they approach individual parishes, the “adjudicatory heads” of several religious denominations in Orange County were asked to sit on the committee. Currently, the Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopal, United Church of Christ, Lutheran, United Methodist and American Lutheran churches are represented, as well as the Orange County Board of Rabbis. There also are three lay members of the committee: Legal Aid Society lawyer Jeanne Blackwell, Orange County Human Relations Commission Director Rusty Kennedy and Anaheim businessman Amin David Jr.

David, a founding member of the Sponsoring Committee, said the inclusion of the religious community has given the organizing project “a tremendous foundation. It seems to be better now than at any time in its history.”

The committee has a budget of about $140,000 a year, most of which comes from grants, Deck said.

Jesuit priest Mandala still works for the training institute in Oakland--now called the Pacific Institute for Community Organizing (PICO). After attending the Immaculate Heart of Mary meeting with Deputy Chief Hansen, he said that the Sponsoring Committee’s current alignment with churches may make the groups’ confrontational tactics “more disciplined, but they are just as forceful, maybe more so.

“A church group has stability, recognition, and a value system that its members recognize,” Mandala said. “A (strictly) neighborhood group is somewhat artificial.”

Church Endorsement

The endorsement of the Catholic Church is particularly important in drawing Latinos into the local groups, Deck said. “Hispanics may not be real eager to get involved,” she said. “They’re more eager to get behind something that the church is supporting.”

The committee has hired two full-time organizers from PICO--the Rev. David Mann, who works mostly in Anaheim, and Sister Annette Silva, who concentrates on Santa Ana.

With the pastor’s or rabbi’s approval, Mann and Silva get the parish-community groups started by giving interested congregation members some basic training in organizing and identifying issues. The members of this core group then go out into the community and interview parishioners and neighborhood residents.

“We try to find out what their concerns are . . . and what they would like to see happen in the community,” said June Lauer, a member of a fledgling group at Temple Beth Emet in Anaheim.

After collating the interview results, the group picks out an issue that is of widespread concern--and also is one that can be won.

“We have to win those first battles,” Deck said. Losing an early struggle, she said, reinforces what many new organization members may have believed all along--that they are, in fact, powerless.

Powerful Tool

Mobilizing 300 or 400 people to attend a crowded night-time meeting, however, and once there, persuading city officials to see things your way, can be a powerful organizing tool in itself, committee organizers say.

“Parishioners sense that they can change things,” said John Rodenbaur, an Anaheim resident who has been active in the St. Boniface group’s effort to clean up Pearson Park. “It isn’t just the person with money who gets things done. The average citizen, when working with the same concern, can accomplish a lot.”

Jeanne Eberle, who helped forge the Anaheim United Methodist group’s agreement with local convenience and liquor store owners to take extra measures to stop the sale of alcohol to minors, said that the group’s success lies in its tight organization and thorough researching of issues before taking action.

Other congregations are currently researching issues and devising strategies with which to confront city officials. At First Presbyterian Church in Anaheim, congregants recently met to discuss solutions to two perceived problems: a dangerous intersection adjacent to the church that they believe is badly in need of a traffic light, and a shortage of church parking.

A group also is gearing up to interview congregants and neighborhood residents at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Fullerton. The church’s pastor, Father Richard C. Kennedy, said he was not sure if the group would come up with an issue anytime soon. But he said he welcomes the idea of organizing the community.

“We have to see what unifies us,” Kennedy said. “You have built-in divisions out here with English and Spanish (speakers). . . . This could help break down barriers of fear and distrust of each other.”

No-Nonsense Meetings

One hallmark of Sponsoring Committee-organized groups are their short, detailed agendas and no-nonsense meetings--in sharp contrast to some other neighborhood meetings that drag on for hours. Residents’ testimony on an issue is limited to one or two minutes each--for a total of 15 or 20 minutes. Panel members, such as Melvin Davis, are coached before meetings with city officials--”actions” in Sponsoring Committee parlance--on how to ask direct questions and keep the discussion from getting off track.

“How would you like to sit in a meeting for three hours?,” Silva asked rhetorically. “The idea is to get something done. We attempt to talk with the person who has the power to fix whatever is wrong.”

Hansen--the targeted city official at two recent Santa Ana meetings--said he thought the groups’ organizing efforts will “eventually have a positive effect even though it originates in conflict. . . . (Their approach) is designed on confrontational tactics, but I don’t really object to confrontation. . . . When the conflict subsides, the actual working relationship will be beneficial.”

Silva said the group’s tactics are confrontational “in its true sense--you come face to face and speak the truth to one another”, but are not an “affront . . . intended just to make you angry, or to make you look bad.”

The pastor at St. Boniface church, the Rev. John Lenihan, said his only concern about the organizing project is that a leadership vacuum might develop if Silva and Mann one day move on, or if their efforts to organize the whole county spread them too thin.

But Silva said the “primary goal” of her and Mann’s work is to help local leadership develop so that outside organizers will no longer be needed.

“It’s important to pray for a just society,” she said. “But it’s also important to work to bring it about.”