Activists Seek to Organize Church-Based Political Coalition

In a small meeting room at a San Fernando church, more than two dozen clergy, church and synagogue leaders gathered recently to hear a little talk about three big concepts: power, organization and leadership.

And they talked about how little of the three their congregations had.

“There’s no sense of community anymore,” one pastor said. “Families feel isolated,” said an activist from another church. “There are no fundamental values over which people are organized,” a third religious leader said.

But by the time the meeting ended, the leaders knew a lot more about one way to, as one speaker put it, “organize the powerless.”

What they and other San Fernando Valley pastors and rabbis must now decide is whether to enlist their congregations into forming a single large church-based organization that could evolve into one of the biggest, most broadly based and influential coalitions of residents in the Valley.

It is the first such effort to mobilize a Valleywide citizens’ action group.

The clergy involved are so seriously committed to the effort that they have hired professional organizers to help them get off the ground. They vow that it is only a matter of time before the organization debuts with the strength of thousands of Valley residents. Their target is mid-1988.

But obstacles exist and skeptics abound.

Support comes primarily from Roman Catholic churches and, if they are to truly represent the Valley, organization leaders say they must have support from the area’s large Jewish population.

Although organizers have only recently begun to solicit support from other denominations, they have yet to convince a synagogue or more than a handful of non-Catholic congregations to join.

Moreover, some key clergy question whether one sweeping organization can speak for the diverse economic and ethnic communities of the Valley--from the barrios in the northeast to the fashionable neighborhoods in the west. Others feel that churches should not be in the business of creating powerful citizens’ groups.

For the past three years, however, a handful of Valley clergy, mostly Roman Catholic priests, have quietly been attempting to garner support for the grass-roots organization they informally call the San Fernando Valley Organizing Committee. Their effort came from a growing frustration over their inability to help parishioners with problems like inadequate housing and increasing crime.

So far, clergy from 14 churches throughout the Valley have endorsed the idea of an action group.

A Valleywide coalition of churches would be powerful enough to “give our people a voice at City Hall, with the police, with the schools,” said Father Paul Waldie, pastor of St. Ferdinand’s Church in San Fernando and spokesman for the organizing committee.

To guide the committee through its formative stages, the clergy have hired organizers from the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a group founded in 1940 by the late radical labor organizer Saul D. Alinsky.

Once it is off the ground, the grass-roots organization will teach ordinary people how “to go into action” to get things done, said Larry McNeil, IAF associate director who supervises California operations. Citizens will learn how to speak in public, make contact with politicians and research government documents, he said.

“Part of what people are missing in their lives is that they have no sense of action, of belonging to something big,” McNeil said.

The IAF method of building big community organizations apparently works. The professional organizers have shaped several of the most effective grass-roots groups in Los Angeles.

The Valley group will be a sister to the 10-year-old United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) in the East Los Angeles area and the 6-year-old South Central Organizing Committee (SCOC). A third group, the East Valley Organization (EVO), was launched in the San Gabriel Valley last year.

UNO and SCOC, known for their confrontational tactics in pressuring politicians and business owners, have successfully fought for a long list of community needs, including reduced automobile insurance rates in East Los Angeles, cleaner supermarkets, tighter laws on liquor stores and creation of a city- and county-funded program to curtail gang violence.

More recently, UNO and SCOC convinced the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce to make 1,500 jobs available to graduating seniors at six inner-city high schools in an ambitious bid to curb the high dropout rate. Then, three weeks ago, all three groups joined to tackle their most far-reaching issue to date, rallying before the state Industrial Welfare Commission to increase the minimum wage from $3.35 to $5.01 an hour.

Several Valley church leaders said the track record of these older groups drew them to the new organization. Others said they see the organization as a practical way to address community issues that impact their congregations.

“I was astonished to find that there was practically nothing out here that gives the masses of middle-class people a voice,” said the Rev. Sean Flanagan, pastor of St. Catherine of Siena Church in Reseda. “I want to show my folks how to go after things.”

Pastors of the already committed Valley churches have pledged time, money or both. The fledgling committee has received two large donations--$30,000 from the Campaign for Human Development, a social service group that distributes grants for the Catholic Church, and $20,000 from the SCOC.

They initially are aiming to sign up six more churches and synagogues as so-called “member units” and raise between $150,000 to $200,000 to pay for office space and salary for an IAF staff organizer for two years.

Now in the home stretch of what they call the “sponsoring stage,” organizers are quick to point out that they do not yet have an agenda of issues to tackle or a list of goals to conquer. That all comes later.

For now, the organizers are meeting privately with clergy from large and small congregations to discuss their concerns.

Under the IAF method, churches and synagogues are pursued as member units because they represent large numbers of people who are morally committed to their causes and because they have money enough to sustain the organization, churchmen said.

Catholic churches have been the first to lend support in the Valley for two reasons, committee leaders said.

First, Juan Arzube, an auxiliary archbishop in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, started the process in 1975 by encouraging parish priests to set up UNO. Later, priests were instrumental in starting up SCOC. Those successes have given member priests in the Valley confidence that they, too, can make a difference, the leaders said.

Easier to Organize

Second, the Catholic churches are already structured geographically, which makes it easier to organize in a specific area, committee members said. Moreover, each parish includes between 2,000 to 2,500 families, creating a large pool of potential support.

Member churches are required to pay annual dues, which range from $500 to $2,000, depending on the size of the congregations.

Homeowner associations, which traditionally represent the interests of Valley residents on issues from development to crime, specifically are not being sought as member units, McNeil said. The groups are “not ideologically driven, but turf-driven,” he explained.

“They tend to be narrow in their particular focus . . . ,” McNeil said. “They usually are powerful only in affluent neighborhoods.”

Organizers say the Valley committee will be able to claim a broad base because priorities and issues will be decided by representatives of all member units. Typically, IAF encourages organizations to formally launch themselves through a communitywide convention at which these goals are publicly announced.

But committee leaders in the Valley said they are still far from that point.

Their pressing task is to enlist support from the Jewish congregations. The Valley is home to the sixth largest Jewish population in the country.

“We can’t claim to be a Valley organization without involvement from the Jewish community,” said Sister Carmel Sommers, the IAF staff organizer in the Valley.

Although no synagogue or Jewish organization has yet to pledge support, the organization has sparked the interest of several rabbis and Jewish community leaders.

“The Jewish community is exceptionally well-organized already, especially in the Valley,” said Rabbi Jonathan Miller of Stephen S. Wise Temple in Bel-Air, which includes many Valley Jews in its congregation, reported to be the country’s largest. “I’m not sure yet how we would fit it. But I’m interested in broad-based community coalitions and interested in seeing how this one unfolds.”

Rabbi Donald Goor of Temple Judea in Tarzana said he, too, is looking into the possibility of joining.

“Idealistically, it sounds wonderful,” he said, adding that he was “a little apprehensive” that a single grass-roots organization could represent the diverse interests of the Valley.

Representatives from the San Fernando Valley chapter of the Jewish Federation Council, an umbrella group for 500 smaller Jewish organizations, also said they are interested in finding out how they might fit into the organization.

Jewish religious leaders are not the only ones with questions.

Several Protestant pastors said they were bothered by the notion of a powerful organization that might use pickets and group protests to make a point.

“The accumulation of power is not my interest. I need to find out more about that aspect of the organization,” said Pastor Roy Riggs of the United Methodist Church in Sepulveda. “It makes me a little skeptical about an organization that is pitching something for a fee.”

McNeil said questions are common in the early stages of organizing and insists that he welcomes such inquiries.

“Skeptical people often make the best leaders,” he said. “Now they are asking, ‘Why do we need outsiders telling us what is best?’ Later, they are the ones who will be skeptical about political leaders and helpful in determining the ‘winnability’ of issues.”

One skeptical clergy member, who did not want to be named because he doesn’t want to ‘jinx’ the organization, said he “can’t see people in Pacoima getting excited about traffic congestion on Ventura Boulevard or people in Studio City who send their kids to private school coming out for mass meetings on behalf of the dismal conditions of schools in the north Valley.”

Others had similar concerns, saying that UNO and SCOC were organized in more economically and ethnically homogeneous areas of the city where it is easier to define and fight for common goals.

But, said Carol Kornansky, director of community relations for the Jewish Federation Council, even bringing Valley residents together to talk may be healthy because “we don’t have that kind of interaction now.”