An Excerpt from Transforming Communities by Rev. Sandhya Jha

NOTE: This excerpt is from Transforming Communities, chapter 9, published by Chalice Press. This chapter focuses on the community organizing model called “Faith Rooted Organizing,” which borrows from the strands of the Gandhian independence movement, the US civil rights movement, Latin American liberation theology, and the Filipino workers’ movement’s principled resistance model. If you're interested in other tools Sandhya has found helpful in their organizing work, check out the end of this article, which provides links to articles in their newsletter that might serve you well.

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I remember the first time I participated in an action with Faith Alliance for a Moral Economy (FAME). I had mentioned that I care a lot about workers’ rights, and FAME organizer Kristi Laughlin said, “We have an action happening this weekend — it brings together environmentalists, workers, and low-income community members dealing with pollution in their neighborhood. It’s kind of throwing you in at the deep end, because this campaign has been going on a long time and doesn’t look likely to end any time soon, so this is a really disruptive action. If you don’t want to go, I understand.” 

I wasn’t going to admit I was scared, so I showed up in front of Oakland City Hall wearing my stole. And while I had been involved in social justice work (even faith-based social justice work) for years, I could tell this was something different. Environmentalists and union workers (Black and South Asian Sikh and Latino arm in arm) and community members of low-income mostly Black west Oakland marched in with rabbis and pastors to take over a port commission meeting to demand dignity for the drivers who had been forced into being independent contractors. Independent contractor status means the company no longer has responsibility for owning or maintaining trucks, passing on both maintenance and environmental improvement costs to the drivers while also not having to cover insurance or provide basic quality of life conditions for the drivers. 

The mix of people in that action wasn’t the only thing that helped me realize FAME was doing something different, although I had never seen that particular intersection of people in one movement before. Something else struck me even more powerfully. The pastor who took the mic at the commission meeting let them know that the commissioners had repeatedly refused to sit down and hear the stories of the workers, so the workers had come to the commission. He let them tell their stories in Punjabi and Spanish and English. He let members of the community speak their grief about children in the neighborhood breathing in toxic fumes and living with asthma because the trucks had to idle in their neighborhood for hours or else they might lose the contracting job that would put food on their tables. And then he said to the commissioners whose meeting we had disrupted, “We love you, though. We are here in love. We are here because we believe in your basic goodness and so we knew you needed to hear these stories in order to do God’s will.” And as we marched out chanting “Good jobs, clean air!” the chant I heard was “We love you, though.”

[A]t this point I find myself realizing that over the past several decades, we have been putting in more and more effort to achieve smaller and smaller wins. The “meet power with power” model isn’t working because social and political structures are in place that ensure poor people and people of color will always have less power. As a result, I’ve begun recognizing that process is a much more important part of the social justice movement than I fully realized. And the way in which we engage each other is part of how we redefine power.  

Our salvation is wrapped up in one another. The increasingly popular phrase from southern Africa is “Ubuntu,” which is roughly translated to “I am because you are,” or “I am because we are.” Whenever I talk about the principle of Ubuntu in public settings, people seem to feel really heart-warmed and inspired by the end of my talks. 

I think I might be talking about it wrong. And I think I’ve figured out why. 

Visually, we picture racial reconciliation as breaking down a wall, but really it’s moving a tall building with no staircases or elevators from vertical to horizontal so that people who could not move from floor to floor can now climb out the windows and meet each other for real. (And in that image, people get bumped around as the building tilts the full 90 degrees, and the folks on the top floor take a pretty big tumble.) 

In a church, mosque, gurdwara, synagogue or temple where people seek comfort rather than challenge, the good news of Ubuntu isn’t particularly good news, because it is such hard work.

[In a campaign I supported as a pastor in the late 2000s], workers at a country club in the San Francisco suburbs were locked out of their jobs for not agreeing to a truly unjust contract with management. What this meant in practice was that those who stood with their union showed up for work one day to discover they were not allowed to work or collect any wages even though they had done nothing other than try to negotiate the exact same contract they had negotiated in previous years. In addition to being financially devastating for workers who relied on a fair wage job to support families, their campaign to get their jobs back taught them some painful realities about the people for whom they worked. The workers were vilified and derided by some country club members; even members who supported them wouldn’t do so publicly because the one member who did was blackballed and shunned. During one picket, a member biked by with a baby stroller attached to her bike. The toddler stuck his hand out of the stroller to give the workers a thumbs down. The mother had trained her child to taunt the workers.

Leading up to Mother’s Day, they engaged in a three-day fast for worker justice to remind people that working mothers were being hurt by the unjust contract which suddenly made them pay their own health care (which constituted up to 40 percent of their pay if they had children, during a record breaking earnings year for the club). While they stood in front of the clubhouse handing out flyers on the third day of their fast, one country club member spat at a worker that the worker was tearing apart families because the member’s son wouldn’t cross their picket line to have Mother’s Day brunch. The worker this member spat at had adopted three children the day before she was locked out of her job. Talk about tearing apart families.  

On Good Friday, clergy gathered across the road from the golf course to do a foot-washing of the workers’ feet, acknowledging their dignity. Most of the clergy wouldn’t speak out in favor of the workers, because they had country club members in their pews and didn’t want to alienate them. The workers were aware of this and hurt by it. And as the clergy read scriptures that honored the dignity of “the least of these,” a worker came to the megaphone. He had been on the picket line for a year, locked out of a job he wanted to do as long as he was compensated fairly for his work. His church hadn’t shown up for him because the priest did not want to get involved in politics. His salary had supported his sister’s family struggling at home in Mexico, and the whole extended family was suffering. Through translation, he read Jeremiah 22:13–17:

And in reading that passage, he shamed those pastors who would not speak out publicly, who would not sign letters in the local paper or show up to city council meetings even when the city’s mayor publicly supported the workers. He didn’t do it harshly. He didn’t even use his own words. He just reminded them that God stood stronger for the dignity of workers than they did. That day, he was the most powerful faith leader in the group, and he taught all of us about what it meant to be people of faith in a Good Friday world.

For me, that’s at the heart of the salvific power of faith rooted organizing. As under-sung hero of the civil rights movement Ella Baker famously said, “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” Faith-rooted organizing reminded our elected officials of who their best selves are. And long before we ever get in front of those officials, it is about us reminding each other and ourselves of who our best selves are. Faith rooted organizing is about the saving of our communities in the here and now by nurturing us into collaborative leadership to build up an alternative community with an alternative way of navigating power. It is about ultimately creating new systems where everyone’s gifts are honored and everyone’s needs are met, and where there are no enemies or “targets.”

In these moments, I take comfort from a story I have heard Alexia tell many times during the faith-rooted organizing trainings she facilitates. When she was a community organizer in the Philippines, she worked with some amazing women who were demanding the factory they worked at compensate them fairly and give them safe working conditions. 

As a small act of resistance, the women planted banana trees by their housing compound so they could better feed their children. When they came back from work, the company had razed the banana trees with bulldozers. The women wept. And then they got back to organizing. Alexia asked how they could keep going when every effort got torn down.      

“Because we’ll win soon,” they responded.

“How can you say that? This will take years!” Alexia protested. 

“Yes. Soon,” they agreed. “Our daughters’ daughters will see victory. Soon.” 

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Rev. Sandhya Jha is an ordained Disciples of Christ minister with a long history of community organizing and anti-oppression work. They have published six books with Chalice Press and are currently working on a Ph.D. in social welfare.

Sandhya has an occasional newsletter about what they're learning about social justice practices while they are at school; it also sometimes provides concrete tools to use in the workplace or in the neighborhood to move forward our shared commitment to inclusion and justice. A couple of pieces that might be of particular interest include The Four R's (which type are you; how do you relate to others?), The Social Change Ecosystem (it's like the enneagram of social movements), and a description of an incredible podcast about "the church with AIDS," the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, who showed up in amazing ways for the LGBTQ+ community before, during, and after the AIDS crisis that swept their community.