Interfaith Organization Makes Great Strides
When we envision social justice work in a synagogue or church, a few images might come to mind. We might think about a group of congregants visiting a soup kitchen, or spending an afternoon serving a meal to homeless people. Synagogues around the Greater Boston area are beginning to consider how they might intensify this social justice work by engaging congregants in public policy issues and, addressing the root causes of problems facing their communities.
Taking synagogue social justice work up a notch is a difficult task, and congregations are often unsure how to get started. However, a group called Metropolitan Interfaith Congregations Acting for Hope, or MICAH, brings together clergy from the Metrowest community, representing Catholic, Protestant and Jewish congregations, to address that very task. This group was founded over the last year and a half by clergy committed to making local and regional change by addressing issues that were important to their own communities. Lew Finfer, of the Organizing Leadership Training Center, convened the MICAH clergy and introduced faith based organizing principles to the group as a model to pursue their shared goals.
MICAH was able to identify several initiatives to focus on, which include: outreach work to involve more congregations, leadership training to expose leaders and clergy to community organizing, support work for the congregations who have been involved, and fundraising to hire a full time organizer/Executive Director for the new organization.
In the last year and a half, MICAH clergy have worked hard in pursuit of these goals and initiatives. Twenty five congregations are now involved in the organization, and their group is diverse both in its geographic and religious breadth, in addition to being racially diverse. In meeting its goal to carry out leadership trainings, MICAH clergy have attended 3 day-long trainings (including JCRC’s 2004 Tzedek Institute on November 14th). They have also provided trainings for several of the individual congregations whose clergy are part of the group; which has allowed them in turn, to train 100 more people in leadership and community organizing skills. Their goal of providing support to congregations who are involved has been accomplished through several projects. MICAH has worked with other groups to get better health care access and to reduce emergency room waiting times in Metrowest communities. Some clergy from MICAH have been involved in a campaign to allow undocumented or illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses. Many of these immigrants are working, tax-paying people living in Metrowest communities where public transportation is less accessible, and driving in necessary to get to work. MICAH clergy, both with immigrant constituencies at their congregations and without those constituencies, met with their legislators to pass this bill for driver’s licenses for immigrants, which has been passed in six other states. This project is an example of how groups of people can come together to make social change. MICAH provides the connection among groups of dedicated people to build the power to make social justice change.
The fundraising piece of MICAH’s work has been a huge success – they recently achieved their goal of raising $90,000. The money has come mostly from religious foundations, in addition to individual congregations. Now that the money has been raised, MICAH can begin its search for a full time organizer/Executive Director. This accomplishment is meaningful on several different levels for MICAH. The actual success of raising the money is significant in that “this group of 30 or so clergy put their heads together and worked in close partnership, in some cases across religious lines, to seek money from our various organizations,” explained Rabbi Sharon Clevenger, from Temple Beth Elohim in Wellesley, who is one of the newer members of MICAH. “But what it really means is that it gives us credibility. These organizations believe in our cause.” Reverend Anthony Lloyd of the Greater Framingham Community Church, agrees: “Raising the $90,000 is an affirmation by institutions, entities outside of our congregations, on their part to say, ‘We believe that you have stumbled onto something, there is potential for the future of this group.’ It is an affirmation of the work that we’ve put in already, that we’re doing the right thing.” Thus, raising this money is a symbol of what the people involved in MICAH knew already – that this group is going in the right direction.
In addition to being a symbol of success and potential, this fundraising effort also helps the group pragmatically. According to Reverend Barbara Williamson, of St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church, “One of the things that’s been really clear in the work that we’ve done so far is that every clergy person as well as our congregants, who will eventually be involved, is that we all have day jobs. Without a professional organizer to keep us organized, it is hard to imagine how this group could be sustained. Lew Finfer has been invaluable to this group. We need a full-time organizer to do the legwork. I’m not sure if we could sustain the group without an organizer, and we really want to.”
This desire to secure MICAH’s future is shared by the other clergy. It is clear that MICAH is multi-faceted in its ways of meeting the needs of clergy and congregations. “MICAH has given me a new deeply compelling reason for my rabbinate,” explained Rabbi Clevenger. “I joined MICAH because my gut told me that we as a congregation, we have a lot of potential. Many of our congregants are active in the community and I realized that we could translate that energy into advocacy work through the temple.”
Reverend Williamson found that her congregation was also ready and able to take on some new initiatives. “My congregation had been involved in a process of becoming an open and affirming congregation for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community, and we wanted to continue to do anti-bias work with respect to race and class.” In her position as a spiritual leader, Reverend Williamson explained that “MICAH has emboldened me to speak more clearly and openly about issues of social justice. It has also strengthened my leadership skills – all of the training sessions have been incredibly valuable. This group has also widened my interfaith and ecumenical circle; it has brought me into relationships with a wide variety of clergy I would not have met otherwise who are companions in this work.”
This companionship is clearly built through working together to directly impact the Metrowest communities that are represented within MICAH. Suburban communities most often that work on social justice projects in other communities, often urban ones perceived to be “disadvantaged.” However, as Rabbi Clevenger pointed out, “MICAH in particular is important because it’s serving a community that we don’t realize is in need of service.” Reverend Williamson explained further that Metrowest communities are in need of organized social justice work because individual town government in Massachusetts has a huge role as opposed to county-wide government; so, many towns tend to be very self-focused and self-protected. “Our hope is that by forming a faith-based community organization that crosses town lines, we can work side-by-side with people from communities that all have different kinds of struggle. There’s joblessness in Sudbury, and there’s also joblessness in Framingham, Marlborough, and Stowe. We can help each other if we know about each other’s problems, but if we’re only focused on our own community, we’re limited.”
Now that MICAH has reached its goal of raising the $90,000, the future is open. Because MICAH works from a community organizing framework, in the next year, MICAH will launch a campaign in which each congregation will do information gathering with its congregants. Finfer explained that MICAH is trying to reach half the adults in each congregation through small group meetings as well as one-to-one conversations to “create a web of commitment of connectedness within our congregation,” said Rabbi Clevenger. In addition to building connectedness in the congregation, these meetings will determine what the priorities are within each individual community, and find out if there are similar issues across communities. “It will be great for us to solidify ourselves around some issues that our congregations identify,” said Reverend Lloyd. “This is not a fast process,” Rabbi Clevenger said. “This is a year of organizing and education, so that we can best determine what it is that we can pursue.”
“We hope to increase involvement of our communities in working for a better world in our little corner of the planet,” explained Reverend Williams. “This can happen by being the squeaky wheel, the nudge. One malaise that we suffer from in our culture is that we underestimate how powerful we are as a group. People are always asking, ‘What can I do? What can one person do?’ and one person can do something, but not as much as many persons gathered together.” This is the essence of MICAH, and why it is so important for these many congregations to come together. Reverend Williams summed it up: “If my neighbor is hungry, then I’m not doing my job. We’re called to it in both the Christian and Jewish traditions.”
