Coalition of Grass-Roots Groups Is Reorganizing

For more than a generation, four groups representing 80 churches--and with them tens of thousands of congregants--defined grass-roots organizing in Los Angeles.

But now, after seeing their influence wane, the groups are trying to stage a comeback.

Allied with the populist Industrial Areas Foundation, they had once wielded influence. They lowered auto insurance premiums on the Eastside. They drove liquor stores out of South-Central and brought in supermarkets.

They had lofty goals, a philosophy rooted largely in Judeo-Christian tradition and an alphabet soup of names: UNO for United Neighborhood Organization, SCOC for South Central Organizing Committee, EVO for East Valley Organization and VOICE for Valley Organized in Community Efforts.

But by the end of the 1990s, only a few churches remained dues-paying members of the IAF. Its legendary UNO, once an influential cluster of 24 Catholic parishes on the Eastside, had dwindled to La Placita Church on Olvera Street.

So when 700 parents, teachers and religious leaders filled Thorne Hall at Occidental College this summer, it was a glimpse of what IAF operatives hope will be a grass-roots organizing renaissance in Los Angeles.

The event was an educational summit, the first significant action by a new entity--L.A. Metro Organizing Strategy--that will swallow the four original groups.

The meeting highlight came when L.A. Metro asked that Los Angeles school officials let it install an IAF-conceived school-reform plan at 25 campuses.

To occasional cheers and applause, lay leader Lucy Morado, a parishioner at St. Matthias Church in Huntington Park, told the parents that L.A. Metro could transform them from common people into leaders empowered to confront politicians.

“I’m an ordinary person like you, parents,” she told them. “I’ve been transformed.”

After Supt. Roy Romer, Mayor James K. Hahn and other politicians walked into a packed auditorium, typical IAF tactics kicked in. Msgr. David O’Connell, pastor of St. Frances Cabrini and Ascension churches in South L.A., bluntly questioned the guests in front of the energized crowd.

“We want to know,” he said, “do you support our proposal?”

Then someone quickly handed the politicians the microphone.

“I am your partner,” said an enthusiastic superintendent.

“Absolutely,” said the mayor.

The crowd cheered after each answer.

The action was a throwback to the glory years of the IAF. Mobilizing thousands from Los Angeles’ urban corners, UNO, SCOC, EVO and VOICE rode a wave of success.

They helped ban certain assault weapons in California and laid the groundwork for what became the LEARN schools strategy in the Los Angeles schools.

The first significant organizing effort in Los Angeles by the Chicago-based IAF began in the mid-1970s, when activist priests from Eastside parishes hired one of the IAF’s up-and-coming organizers--the low-key but effective Ernesto Cortes--to organize their parishioners. UNO was founded in 1976. After two years, Cortes went back to his native Texas to supervise IAF organizing there.

In 1981, the SCOC was launched to organize African Americans in South-Central. EVO came in 1987 to galvanize upwardly mobile Mexican Americans in the San Gabriel Valley. VOICE, founded in 1988, aimed to involve African Americans and Latinos in the East San Fernando Valley.

But slowly, the work of organizing--house meetings and leadership seminars--fell by the wayside.

“We weren’t recruiting new institutions. We weren’t recruiting new leaders,” said Mike Clements, a longtime IAF organizer. “We were taking existing leaders and involving them in some very good work, but I would say we went way overboard.”

Groups Recognized ‘We Needed Change’

Two particular programs the four organizations ran in the 1990s depleted their leadership.

Hope in Youth, launched in 1991, was a massive countywide program to combat an epidemic of gang killings. The Active Citizenship campaign, which processed the immigration paperwork of 30,000 people, was launched in 1994 after passage of Proposition 187.

In the spring of 1998, the IAF’s national leadership sent Cortes to Los Angeles to assess the groups. When he suggested that the few remaining lay leaders reorganize their “core team”--an IAF term for key lieutenants--someone asked, “What’s a core team?” That’s when Cortes knew the groups needed a lot of work.

As a result, “we argued and conspired,” said Sister Maribeth Larkin, a member of the order of Sisters of Social Service, who had helped form UNO. “Should we rebuild? Should we try to retool these organizations? If so, what makes sense?”

In time, the groups “recognized that we needed change,” said the Rev. William Delaney, whose St. Agnes Church near USC was a longtime SCOC member. “With any kind of change, there’s a kind of death. But if you insist on being where you were 10 years ago, you’re going to be living in the past.”

So IAF organizers began knocking on doors and dialing numbers to reconnect with pastors and recruit new ones--which didn’t come automatically.

“I was a bit hesitant initially on jumping back on because, yes, I had thought that we had drifted from the roots” of organizing, said the Rev. Jarlath Cunnane, pastor of St. Thomas Church in Koreatown. Even so, he did come back.

Since L.A. Metro started in January 1999, it has pushed its membership back up to about 80 groups, mostly churches but also temples, schools and unions.

It hopes to enlist 150 institutions by the fall of 2002, when it plans to have its founding convention. L.A. Metro is a temporary name for the three-year effort leading up to the convention.

During the last two years, the IAF has gone back to its trademark brand of organizing: holding thousands of house meetings, intimate discussions in which people are paired up to share hopes and concerns for their communities.

L.A. Metro’s eventual agenda will come from these meetings. So far, education, immigration, and a lack of affordable housing and health insurance have emerged as primary concerns.

House meetings are the kind of grass-roots work the IAF had neglected.

“Now that’s happening at Trinity Elementary, it’s happening at 49th Street, it’s happening at St. Agnes,” Larkin said. “It’s happening in a lot of different places.”

Especially holy places.

This time around, L.A. Metro is reaching out to other institutions, but a cornerstone of IAF organizing is to appeal to a person’s spiritual and religious convictions.

The IAF was established in the 1940s by radical activist Saul Alinsky to organize common people so they could influence the political process.

He first found receptive audiences in progressive priests and their congregations. He saw churches as fertile ground where the Judeo-Christian principles of justice could be crossbred with civic involvement.

“That’s why I think both the Christian gospel and the organizing culture of L.A. Metro Strategy are so very important to me,” said the Rev. Ed Bacon, rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, a new IAF recruit.

The four original IAF groups in Southern California had consisted primarily of urban Catholic parishes, but the leaders saw L.A. Metro as a more diverse organization: geographically, religiously and socioeconomically.

It was a proud moment for Rabbi Marc Dworkin in June when L.A. Metro hosted a mayoral forum at his Leo Baeck Temple--another newcomer to the IAF--in Bel-Air.

“Our temple, at its core, believes in social justice,” Dworkin said. “We don’t want to be isolated from the issues pressing on our city.”

Leo Baeck and churches such as LaVerne Heights Presbyterian Church exemplify L.A. Metro’s goal of involving the middle class.

Also, a key strategy of IAF organizing is establishing relationships among many institutions.

“Relationships matter--within a congregation, a neighborhood and a city,” said the Rev. Frank Alton, pastor of Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Koreatown.

The power of the personal touch was evident in May when St. Raphael Church and School, an IAF member in South-Central, orchestrated a town hall meeting to complain about poor drainage, crime and prostitution in the neighborhood.

IAF Members Host Town Hall Meetings

About 500 African American and Latino parents packed the auditorium. Their guests were Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, 77th Street Station Capt. Jim Miller and Director of Public Works Wayne Moore.

Community members who had been victims of crime told their stories. Parks asked Miller to look into the prostitution problem right away. Parks and Moore promised long-term relationships with the church.

“We are just one little parish,” Father Tracy O’Sullivan told the community. “But if we get together, we have the power to make our voices heard.”

Several miles to the east, in working-class Cudahy, residents also gathered in May under the IAF banner. They were led by Sal Valdez, a parishioner at St. Alphonsus Church on the Eastside, who had reflected on the moving stories he heard in house meetings.

“They can be very sad stories,” he said. “But you don’t want it to remain at that level. You want to get into the anger and the desire to do something.”

The IAF looks for “cold anger” in its recruits, anger that leads to positive action. And Valdez became a lay leader in L.A. Metro because he had anger.

He was angry that state and school officials had not cleaned up the arsenic-laced soil at Park Avenue Elementary in two decades. In May, Valdez marched into the school auditorium with 500 chanting parents and teachers behind him.

The parents took the microphone, and officials listened wide-eyed as they demanded that the soil be cleaned. Then a representative for Supt. Romer gave them a surprise: The soil would be cleaned.

The parents cheered, and at their next organizing meeting, they were brimming with confidence.

“You can almost touch this change that came over them,” Valdez said. “ ‘Empowered’ is a good word.”