Faith In/And Democracy Grantee Profile: Organizing to bring people together across lines of race in participatory democratic action
A Conversation with ISAIAH
Faith In/And Democracy is a pilot funding and learning initiative led by PACE to explore the ways faith and faith communities can support democracy and civic life. PACE caught up with all five of the cohort participants to get a status update on their projects thus far, and we are releasing a series of interviews over the next month to highlight their leadership and share more about their early learnings.
Faith-based community organizing group ISAIAH is hoping to address the growing racial tensions in Southern Minnesota, invigorate local democracy across the southern part of the state, and promote mutual understanding between different communities. Here’s more from our conversation:
Q: Tell us more about your project. What are the tangible action impacts you are pursuing?
A: Through this project, ISAIAH aims to engage 200 people in southern Minnesota to attend trainings to build their leadership skills — with the goal of developing citizens into more powerful advocates for themselves, their congregations, their communities, and their towns.
At the end of this project, ISAIAH hopes to have at least three towns participating in wide outreach to voters to encourage non-partisan civic participation in the 2020 elections. Additionally, we hope to see significant interactions across ethnic identities and religions in five towns in the region. For example, we have formed a Rochester leadership team with mainly white and Latino leaders that organized a fall community leadership assembly and will continue to strategize together in monthly meetings. Our Muslim Coalition is also building relationships in the local mosques and will add Muslim leaders to the leadership team in the next couple of months.
Q: Why did you take this on and what do you hope it achieves?
A: Rising racial tensions across southern Minnesota have divided the area and have neighbors turning on one another. From the presence of organized white supremacy groups to Islamophobia, vandalism, and racism towards the Somali population in the area — the growing divisions need to be addressed.
We are hopeful that the core principles of faith — and the trusted messengers of clergy and religious leaders — can help communities in southern Minnesota skirt partisan divides and reduce tensions in a divided community. When people share personal experiences in a space of trust, and listen to others telling their stories, they frequently find they have more in common than they knew. Our hypothesis is that this methodology can reduce racial polarization, promote common understanding, and re-engage people with civic life.
Q: What are you learning so far?
A: Our biggest learning so far is that people are more vulnerable and open in their own local communities. We’ve seen that local issue campaigns can make a real difference in our community members’ lives, create opportunities for people to experience agency and leadership, and can lead to concrete wins.
We had initially envisioned that communities participating in the Deep Listening Campaign would build towards a large regional summit in the fall of 2020. However, it became clear that it was more strategic to hold larger community-level summits and then a regional videoconference with leaders spanning several communities. With this approach, we believe we had higher attendance at the community level, such as over 60 leaders in Northfield and over 150 in Rochester. Smaller community-level deep listening trainings in newer communities like Albert Lea and Red Wing also equipped leaders to hold “house meetings.” These spaces opened powerful conversations about people’s concerns, hopes, and visions, and invited more new people to build our agenda with us. We have also learned that it’s helpful to create multiracial, multifaith spaces (where possible) for neighbors to be vulnerable with one another about issues impacting their loved ones and develop a civic engagement strategy that is rooted in local context.
Q: What success have you seen so far in your project? Any stories to share?
A: We are starting to build deep solidarity across race in Southern Minnesota. In Owatonna, for example, the new team of the imam and leaders at the Owatonna mosque hosted a multiracial conversation with about 30 community members in attendance. This December, we then had a strategy session with top Somali and white leaders at the mosque to discuss our Faith Agenda, what was impacting the community, and how we want to center faith values in democratic action in 2020.
We also organized an interfaith immigrant rights coalition in Rochester that launched an immigrant legal defense fund. This coalition is now supporting the new Latinx leader team’s campaign for a city ID for all Rochester residents. It has been challenging to organize Latinx communities as they have been excluded from civic engagement and public resources. Given significant fear and uncertainty in the community, it has been amazing to see how many members of Rochester’s Latinx community are choosing faith over fear and are jumping into the city ID campaign.
Q: What are your biggest challenges as you look ahead?
A: The challenges we are facing in this project are threefold:
- Geography: We are stepping into the tension of really rooting things in local place and creating strategic opportunities for regional alignment and solidarity.
- Divisive political atmosphere: People are experiencing the politics of fear and division in their communities, and this is the backdrop to all our work. Many are fearful of broaching issues of concern with their neighbors and inside their congregations, and they yearn for deeper relationships but do not know where to start.
- Conflating political and partisan: Many clergy at our regional clergy meeting named the tension that speaking from their faith can be interpreted as partisan, and in the age where many churches are dying, they fear losing members if they speak too boldly. Our work requires calling on clergy to act prophetically from their faith towards social justice that is inherently political, yet non-partisan. Politics is ultimately the process of collective decision-making and resource distribution, which should be rooted in shared values and who we are to one another. We stay non-partisan by grounding our conversations in our faith traditions and/or shared values and question how to live those out in policy and practice without advocating for specific parties or candidates. We then equip our members to share their values and personal stories with decision-makers like elected officials, and increasingly we are attempting to bring our agenda into spaces of decision-making ourselves, such as the caucuses. Committing to love our neighbors regardless of their skin color, faith tradition, or where they were born, requires us to call for that inside our congregations, in our communities, and with our representatives.
