Remarkable Session on Curing City’s Ills : Interfaith Group Has Good Ideas to Stem Anaheim Violence, if Money Can Be Found

Hundreds of people from an interfaith group gathered at St. Boniface Catholic Church in Anaheim last week to present a laundry list of requests to Mayor Tom Daly. The hope is to stem the tide of violence in the city by implementing a plan of action for young people, a very worthy goal indeed.

The problem, of course, with this and any crying community need is likely to be money. Daly listened patiently to the requests for the creation of a teen center, a computer lab, the expansion of youth programs at the George Washington Community Center, the expansion of the city’s summer jobs program and other good ideas. Then he advised the enthusiastic audience from the Orange County Congregation Community Organization that their ideas necessarily were competing with others for a share of the city pie, and he urged residents to make their priorities heard before the City Council on Tuesday night sessions so that they could get in on the ground floor of the planning. But he did commit to helping implement the organization’s goals, however they might be achieved.

The session was remarkable on a number of levels. This and other efforts in Santa Ana by the same interfaith group constitute a significant grass-roots effort by mainstream people of religious faith in Orange County. They want to mobilize their values toward shaping public policy and to improve a society racked by well-documented ills. These are not the flag-waving, ideologically intransigent members of the Religious Right. They are people who marched to the microphone to give testimony of drive-by shootings on their own streets and to express the urgency they feel to begin transforming a shattered world. If these people do not always approach the budget with a great deal of sophistication about the process, they make up for that easily by bringing a wellspring of hope and enthusiasm to an array of vexing problems that may actually seem insolvable.

One fresh idea brought to the table by the group, for example, was that children might get discounts on parks and recreation fees by doing community work, a kind of “sweat equity.” In a time of competing budget needs, these folks bring needed volunteers to get things done. And in the process, they may be transforming relationships between government providers of services and constituents in some small but meaningful way, to bring government at the local level into partnership with them, even as government serves as a facilitator.