Her Calling: To Help Others Find a Voice

The playground of Santo Nino Center filled up with families from its downtown L.A. neighborhood one recent evening. Parents, grandparents and children ventured into a part of town where most people stay home after dark, but this gathering meant enough to them that they were willing to risk the danger.

As representatives of the Los Angeles Police Department, L.A. Unified School District and City Council arrived to meet with them and answer their questions about safety and local school conditions, other neighbors watched from the steps of their battered stucco homes. Squad cars parked nearby were reassuring, but fathers still pulled their children close when a gleaming car crawled past, thumping like a boombox.

At the chain-link fence, Sister Maribeth Larkin, a Catholic nun who walks with the tilt of a general, handed out programs but kept one eye on the speaker’s platform. After all, she had coached the parents and schoolteachers who would speak out, asking some tough questions this night, and she was eager to keep things moving.

Larkin is a Sister of Social Service, a professional social worker and a senior organizer for L.A. Metro Strategy, which teaches concerned members of churches, schools and community centers how to make allies of local leaders who can then help them improve their neighborhoods.

Some of her latest students, 100 or so organizers in training from cities around the Southwest, filled the back rows of chairs set up on the center’s playground. Larkin, 52, is teaching them to launch community gatherings like the one they have come here to observe.

She winced at the suggestion that she deserves any credit. “I show people how to exercise their own power, to organize themselves and confront injustice,” she said. “They get the credit. All I do is identify talent and mentor people. It’s all about relationships.”

In the last year or so, the families living near Santo Nino at the edge of the city’s garment district have lost 10 young people to street violence. Eight-year-old Anthony Ramirez, the most recent victim, was killed in April by a random bullet that shot through Trinity Park, the local patch of green. For the evening’s meeting, fourth-graders at Trinity School decorated the playground with messages of grief: “No More Broken Promises,” “I Am Tired of the Gangs.”

Their pleas seemed weary beyond their years, but the words expressed just why most of the 300 people in the audience attended. This gathering, or “action”--a word Larkin has coined to describe a dialogue with city representatives to voice specific concerns--included questions to the officials but also stories about the children. In their schools, residents said, the bathrooms are so dirty that the young ones wet their clothes rather than use them. The local park belongs to the drug dealers, and the dangerous streets cost elementary schoolchildren like Anthony Ramirez their lives.

Each story ended with a question put to the speaker’s platform.

Schools Supt. Roy Romer, will you meet with us and make sure that money actually goes to the schools most in need of repairs? And get us the school maintenance staff we need?

Deputy Police Chief Peggy York, will you help create a strategy for better policing in our community? And is it true there will be a new police substation in Trinity Park?

Romer made some general promises; York was specific. “To answer you directly, yes,” she said about the police station. “We’ve worked very well in the past with L.A. Metro groups who’ve taken the initiative to take back their streets.”

That night was a new beginning for a neighborhood that is ready to turn things around. For Larkin, nights like this are part of a personal mission of more than 20 years.

She chose the Sisters of Social Service for that reason and joined the community at age 21, then went on to earn a social work degree. “As a younger person I wasn’t really attracted to religious life,” she said. “All I knew of, for nuns, was teaching and hospital work. I didn’t want to do either.”

Raised in Long Beach, one of four children who lived “on the lower side of middle income,” Larkin worked at a summer camp run by the Social Service nuns and learned more about them.

Later, at Holy Names College in Oakland, she did her share of protest marching against the war in Vietnam. “I didn’t feel that I was very good at agitating,” she said. “We live in an anesthetized culture. We’re not supposed to talk about certain things. But by being around it we learn to keep agitating, and we overcome our personal histories.”

Her first lessons in standing up for herself, and others, came from her older cousin, Mary Margaret, who has Down’s syndrome. “Mary Margaret taught me to be attentive to others and not embarrassed,” Larkin said. She remembers Mary Margaret at a recent family funeral leading the cousins in an impromptu dance around the coffin.

As a young Sister of Social Service, Larkin worked with people who were stuck in bureaucratic red tape because of their poverty, illness or prison records. “It was crisis intervention,” she said. “I realized I was bandaging the problems. With the power we have as sisters, as a church, we can do more than crisis intervention.”

The brash, confrontational work of an organizer seems an odd choice for someone who describes herself as shy. “I understand that most people don’t respond to injustice because they feel invisible,” she told her students after their night as observers at Santo Nino. “I’m a shy person; I’m not prone to social activism.”

That doesn’t stop the negotiator nun from wrapping up conversations with a direct, “I’d like to talk about our next steps.” And she will throw any plan off-kilter with a quick, “We’ll have to see about that.”

In her earliest years as a social worker, Larkin spent a lot of time in the waiting rooms of government agencies, surrounded by people who had been there for days. She, however, got faster attention. “Because I am Anglo, a nun, a professional social worker,” she explained. “It made me angry. I didn’t want to be complicit in this.”

At about that time she got involved with the Industrial Areas Foundation, the national network of which L.A. Metro is part. In the ‘70s, she moved to New York, then Texas and finally back to Los Angeles in 1999. The network crosses economic and religious lines. Locally, All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena and Leo Baeck Temple in Bel-Air are among the 80 members of L.A. Metro Strategy.

To start standing up to the system, Larkin told her students during their last class, they have to believe that confronting injustice can be the start of change. “To stay with it,” she added, “you have to believe in the possibility of goodness. That’s what keeps anger in check.”

It can be distressing to watch Larkin talk about things that matter to her. Her eyes scrunch, the tic in her shoulder will not be calmed, her voice grows heavy with emotion. At times she steps up onto her toes or drops her knees as if she’s just caught a heavy weight.

“You might not associate a nun with passion,” said Lucy Morado, one of Larkin’s students. “But Sister Maribeth is a very passionate person. She cares about being an organizer and cares about families.”

Morado met Larkin three years ago when she came to speak to members of St. Matthias Church in Huntington Park, where Morado is director of religious education. At the time, Morado was beginning to sense that she had to come off the sidelines.

At the Santo Nino meeting, where most families in the audience were first- and second-generation Mexican Americans, Morado was among those who questioned Romer. “I never thought I could stand up and speak publicly,” Morado said later.

“But watching Sister Maribeth has helped me. It’s very important to demand your rights and demand respect.” Morado might say it takes courage to go public; Larkin would say it takes imagination. “We can’t do things we’ve never done unless we can imagine ourselves doing them,” Larkin told her class. “We can’t change our communities unless we can imagine that it’s possible to create a place where children are not getting shot.”

Anthony Ramirez deserved that much. “When we look for leaders for L.A. Metro, we look for certain qualities,” Larkin said. One is the ability to understand the two kinds of anger. “Calculated anger and rage. One is impotent; the other can be a virtue.”