Pace e Bene is collaborating with Congregations Organizing for Renewal (COR). COR is an affiliate of the PICO National Network, a national federation of over 1 million families in 150 cities and 16 states. PICO employs a congregation-based training approach that promotes the civic engagement of everyday neighborhood residents, based on the principle that this country’s greatest resource is our people, and our greatest tradition is democracy. Each member congregation brings together COR leaders who visit face-to-face with church and neighborhood families, building relationships, identifying concerns, and empowering each other to identify lasting solutions to community problems for themselves and their neighbors.

Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service is collaborating with Congregations for Renewal 1) to strengthen its effectiveness through an explicit integration of the ethical values, principles, techniques and strategies of a deeply grounded transformative nonviolence; and, 2) to build its capacity to improve the lives of poor people and to challenge structures of social injustice. This process includes a comprehensive series of FVTW/Engage trainings and consultations to strengthen the work of Congregations for Renewal in Southern Alameda County.

For years there has been no strong, unified voice from low- and moderate-income residents of Southern Alameda County that addresses the myriad of unmet needs in their communities at a time when this area is experiencing the most rapid growth countywide. One critical unmet need focuses on creating constructive responses to youth violence. In Union City, for example, there is only one, extremely large high school (James Logan High School: 4,200 students), which is a hub for youth violence and gang activity. Logan is the largest high school in California after a handful of schools in Los Angeles County. Union City has had the highest number of juvenile violent crime reports generated in Alameda County and is among the highest in California.

COR has increasingly been seeking to meet this need. As part of this process, COR began working with Pace e Bene in 2004 to expand its toolbox for empowering low and moderate-income youth and adults. This collaboration builds on COR’s previous work to create a solid foundation to expand healthy opportunities for youth in lieu of gang violence and related activity. It has built strong relationships with a variety of youth stakeholders and school district policy-makers; it has developed a strong group of parent and youth leaders; it surveyed 50 youth and their families to identify their priorities; it has actively working to shape new and expanded youth activity programming and intervention; it has secured seed funding to support these efforts through PAL (Police Activities League). It partnered with the city of Union City, Logan High School officials, youth and other stakeholders to host the first ever Youth Summit in Union City (2004), where city, community and school officials committed to work together to address these issues through a range of solutions.

In 2004 Pace e Bene began leading nonviolence trainings for COR staff. Based on this experience, COR began to see the power in integrating strategies and tactics of nonviolence with traditional community organizing tools. Nonviolence tools (both conflict resolution AND nonviolent social movement-building) and traditional organizing share historical connections, but more recently the fields have been on parallel but not intersecting paths. Pace e Bene and COR have now decided to partner in order to merge these two approaches and to share learnings, conduct collaborative training and develop even stronger community leaders. The goal is to develop and increase strong youth and parent leadership teams, incorporating Pace e Bene’s Engage: Exploring Nonviolent Living/From Violence to Wholeness programming and community organizing tools. This program will strengthen and deepen their capacity to lead ongoing efforts to bring increased access to youth resources for at-risk southern Alameda County youth.

For more information, contact Ken Preston-Pile.