What are you reading?

We are a peer learning group who share what we are reading to help us in shaping our practices.   I have been doing a monthly book reading group that meets on the first Saturday of the month.  Currently we are reading The Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen and one of my focus is the individual one on one meeting that is the heart of organizing whether parish or community.  Next month we will be reading The Irresistible Revolution: living as an ordinary radical by Shane Claiborne. 

I also suggest for those who are interested in considering the geographical changes that will occur as a result of our economic crisis that we read “How the Crash will reshape America” by Richard Florida in March’s Atlantic Monthly.  The suburbs were a result of the industrialization of our cities. Now we are moving to a new kind of city and how will this new economy shape our culture?

Share your thoughts, comments and readings.

G.Curtiss

The Episcopal Church and Domestic Poverty Alleviation

The Presiding Bishop’s Summit on Domestic Povertry

Faith in the Balance: A Call to Action  (February 2009)

Rev. Christopher A. Johnson
Program Officer, Domestic Justice and Jubilee Ministries

 
“How can we help to break the cycle of poverty? How can we become a place of refuge and healing for the most vulnerable members of our society? How might we be a prophetic voice for those who find themselves stuck in dead-end situations? 

 These are questions Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori challenged participants to address while attending the Summit on Domestic Poverty held at the Franciscan Renewal Center in Scottsdale, Arizona, in May 2008.”

Download: Faith in the Balance: A Call to Action (Report 02/18/2009)

Interfaith Community Organization & Honeywell in New Jersey

The Gospel of Jesus challenges the Church to be engaged in the work of transfiguration and transformation in the world. The Church fulfills this in the work of public ministry. Public ministry can take a variety of forms but one of the most powerful is to join in the effort of a Broad Based Community Organizing Project in your local area.  All Saints Episcopal Parish in Hoboken, NJ has been a member of an Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) organization, the Interfaith Community Organization (ICO) since 1986, and of a Gamalial Organization, the Jubilee Interfaith Organization (JIO) since 1998.

I have come to understand that transfiguration occurs as people often see for the first time the power of the Spirit that calls them into action and will change their local community.

Broad Based Community Organizing seeks to identify and train leaders within the local congregation to organize for change in the world around them out of their own self interest.  What is the congregation they would like, what is the neighborhood they would like?  By connecting people to their self-interest we discover values that are important to us that either our congregation or our neighborhood is not acting upon. 

For example people gather to discuss issues in their situation.  These issues are usually explained through a story that has occurred and expose the value. In 1986 one of the major issues facing our neighborhoods was the drug trafficking that was going on around our local schools.  Parents could not let their children go to school unaccompanied for fear of the implications of passing a drug transaction.  Through our efforts in engaging the State’s Attorney General’s Office and local Police we established Drug Free School Zones which moved the drug trafficking to a perimeter outside of the local school.  So as people talked about the value of safety and security in their neighborhoods they organized to take actions that would change their neighborhood.  These people where transfigured as they practiced the exercise of their power to bring about change. 

As people become engaged in this work trust is built across a coalition of congregations who are now prepared to support one another in public action where the issues become connected to larger areas of concern.  In the late 1980’s the need for more affordable housing was an issue for all of the local congregations.  Through training and organizing we came to understand the complexity of why affordable housing is so difficult for government to create.  Rather than going the route of creating so called affordable housing that was rental and subsidized IAF had a plan that created owner occupied affordable housing, the Nehemiah Project. To build this type of housing however required access to land.  In negotiating with the city we were given land that we soon discovered was contaminated.  After careful study we realized that to clean up this land before we could build on it no longer made the housing affordable.  Rather than giving up we delved deeper into the issue of contaminated land in Jersey City and Hudson County. 

This led ICO into a much larger and much longer struggle to transform Jersey City from the abuses of its industrial past which were now limiting the city’s ability to use certain tracts of land.  The story is that three major producers of chromium resided in Jersey City at three different mother sites.  The waste that results from this process had been distributed widely throughout Jersey City and Hudson County as land fill.  As ICO continued to look at other sites for vacant land that could be used for the creation of housing it became clear that many of the vacant sites had chromium waste on them.  We now had a wide spread problem throughout several neighborhoods in Jersey City.  People discovered that they were living in neighborhoods were the waste had been used as landfill.  We also began to hear stories of high cancer rates in certain neighborhoods that went well beyond normal.  Families who had grown tomato plants in their back yards were also telling stories about the high cancer rate running through their family. What were the causes of this cancer rate?  

Our struggle to clean up the land took an interesting diversion as we learned that the State Department of Environmental Protection was in the process of changing the regulations in regards to clean up to make it easier for the large corporations responsible for the waste to either leave the land dormant and passive or to put a cap on it for commercial use that would only be a short term solution for a long term problem. There was already evidence mounting that capping a site did not secure the site and that caps were heaving over time.  As a result of our findings we realized that both the State and Local government were not going to address our concerns for clean and usable land for residential construction, health studies to assess potential implications in local neighborhoods, and concerns about governments failure to address clean up regulations. It was clear to us that big developers were controlling the effects of their predecessors. 

As a result we sought out an environmental law firm that would be willing to take on our case in the Federal Courts because it was clear that neither state nor local government would protect these low income urban neighborhoods, interestingly nor would one environmental law firm in our State touch the case.  However a Washington, D.C. environmental law firm was very interested in our case.  So we chose a very large chromium contaminated site on Route 440 that was the responsibility of the Honeywell Corporation. For a decade we participated in a long legal process that saw Honeywell repeatedly trying to circumvent the process and find a short cut around their responsibility. However after a significant period the Judge in the Third District Federal Court where the case was being heard ruled that Honeywell would have to clean up the site. In a $440 million dollar judgment the court ruled that Honeywell would have to fully clean up the site to residential standards which in the court’s view meant completely excavating the site and putting in clean land. 

This is a striking victory for the people of Jersey City, Hudson County and our Nation and sets precedents that could have a long lasting effect.  People who could not imagine the possibility have been transfigured and communities that have suffered under the weight of the remnants of the former industrial waste will be transformed.  It is only by joining together for the long haul in networks, that Broad Based Community Organizing builds, that people within our congregations and our neighborhoods can and will bring change. Transfiguration and transformation in the public domain, restoring our ability to participate as citizens, and to repair and restore the breaches this is what is the vision of the Gospel of Jesus.  Let the digging begin, as it will April 2006.

G.Curtiss