The challenge

California’s Central Valley, the fastest growing region in the state, is among the most productive agricultural regions in the world. Nonetheless, The Sacramento Bee refers to California’s Central Valley as “the other California.” “If it were a state — and with 3 million residents, its population rivals Oregon’s — the Valley would have the nation’s sorriest economy,” the Bee reports. Only West Virginia, New Mexico and Washington, DC have higher poverty rates. The economic gap between the Central Valley and the rest of California is widening. Facing these realities, the leaders of the Sacramento Valley Organizing Community (S.V.O.C.) determined that creating more anti-poverty programs, alone, would not close the gap — that life would not improve until those most touched by hardship were fully engaged in the democratic process of change.


Seeds of commitment

S.V.O.C.’s leaders’ commitment to social justice is rooted in the injustices they experienced as children — Carmen Mirazo as an immigrant from Mexico, Rev. Tyrone Hicks and Pastor Cornelius Taylor as the African-American targets of racism; and Larry Ferlazzo, as the child of immigrants, who witnessed the hardships of his grandmother, a worker in a New York garment sweatshop. Each is also motivated by deep religious beliefs. Mirazo is a leader in her parish; Ferlazzo spent seven years in the Catholic Worker Movement working in soup kitchens and emergency shelters; and Hicks and Taylor are longtime pastors. They are, as Rev. Hicks says, “ motivated by the mandate of God to liberate those who are oppressed and speak and stand for justice.”


Accomplishments

S.V.O.C. is a seven year-old organization working in three Northern California counties to bring affordable homes, job-training programs and improved immigration services to low-income people. A recent S.V.O.C. convention brought 3,000 people to negotiate with decision makers — including government leaders — on these and other issues. S.V.O.C.’s diverse leadership team heads a group of more than 40 predominantly Latino and African-American religious institutions and community organizations, including labor unions. S.V.O.C. leaders have assisted thousands of immigrants to become U.S. citizens. They continue to lead efforts to ensure that new companies in the region hire local residents. S.V.O.C. has also built hundreds of homes for purchase by low-income families.

S.V.O.C. leaders emerged from their own neighborhoods or religious communities. Mirazo, active with St. Anne’s Catholic Church, led an effort to take over and rebuild a drug infested apartment complex in her neighborhood. It has become a model of tenant control, and she now lives there. She recruited 20 additional churches into the organization, and has been the prime leader of S.V.O.C.’s immigration campaign. Rev. Hicks, of Murph Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, led an effort to create a nationally recognized welfare to work program that helps participants get living-wage jobs and become active in the life of their communities. Pastor Taylor, of the independent Whole Life Fellowship in Elk Grove, is the organization’s primary leader in its affordable housing campaign; because of this campaign, nearly 1,000 low income families now either own a home or rent an apartment, with a matching savings plan that will help them purchase a home. Ferlazzo supervises S.V.O.C. staff, provides training to both staff and volunteer leaders and leads S.V.O.C.’s expansion effort. S.V.O.C. presently spans three Northern California counties and is expanding to 10 additional counties.

In a recent essay, the four S.V.O.C. leaders wrote, “On one level, we could say a major accomplishment has been building 300 homes that very-low income families were able to purchase. But the real accomplishment was that thousands of low income people led and participated in those campaigns to get the homes. For many of them it was the first time they participated in public life. This awakening has changed the power dynamics in several communities that have seen what an organized and disciplined force of low income people can accomplish.”


Their leadership style

S.V.O.C. is an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) founded by Saul Alinsky. IAF is one of the oldest networks of broad based community organizations in the U.S. “Our leadership is ‘agitational’— to others and to each other,” the leaders write. The nature of their leadership is collective, with individuals taking the lead on specific issues and building relationships within and among neighborhoods. “Working in the collective leadership model instead of in the typical hierarchical one brings much better results in the end and is also much richer relationally, but in some ways is much more painful in the process,” the leaders write. “This is especially the case when everyone in the leadership is strong willed. But we don’t believe you can build an effective broad-based community organization any other way.” They also believe that community leadership requires training. Every year, the Co Chairs identify approximately 15 community members from the organization’s strategy teams to attend the National IAF Institute Training. The essence of S.V.O.C.’s leadership style is not to hoard power, but to spread it.


The future

To expand, S.V.O.C. has launched the North Valley Sponsoring Committee (N.V.S.C.), a membership organization of Latino, African-American, Anglo, Slavic and Southeast-Asian religious congregations, community groups and labor unions throughout 13 counties in California’s north central valley and north coast region. One of N.V.S.C.’s primary goals will be to work across more diverse communities — to include more Anglo- and Asian -American communities and non religious organizations. “Since we are all key leaders in S.V.O.C.’s present expansion project,” the leadership group writes, “we see ourselves as being leaders of an incredibly powerful regional organization with hundreds of institutions as members. We see ourselves as also being mentors to hundreds of new leaders…. Our primary project is to identify and develop new leaders.”


More about the S.V.O.C. leadership team

“I can give you a list of their accomplishments…. But to list these accomplishments misses the point of their work. Their energies are focused on the creation of power and new leaders. I can define the problems in traditional ways, but that traditional framing is secondary to their primary task. In neighborhoods that have been discarded they’ve attracted capital, resources and attention, demonstrating democracy can work where it wasn’t working before. For example, in the neighborhoods where they work, prior to their work voter turnout was 28 to 35 percent. Now it is more than 70 percent.”
— Bill Kennedy, Lead Attorney, Legal Services of Northern California