- Who We Are
- What We Do
- What You Can Do
- Resources
Leaders from the Community: Mi Cometa
Submitted by Nguyen Weeks on Thu, 05/24/2007 - 10:02am.
Joseph Santos-Lyons, the UUA director of campus ministry and field organizing, recently took part in a UUSC fact-finding trip to Ecuador.
Who speaks for you when you're down? Who helps you see the depth and the connection of problems where you live? Who do you trust to tell you the truth?
I've always been an organizer who works primarily from communities of which I am a part: age groups from youth to now mid 30-somethings, identity groups such as mixed-race children and families, and affinity groups like my baseball card collecting friends. The passion and the dedication that comes from organizing in one's own context has been a lifeblood for me.
I've spent two full days now with leaders from Mi Cometa, the Guayaquil, Ecuador community organization that organizes for the welfare of an impoverished neighborhood. I'm learning a lot about their mission and programs, and meeting some of their staff. Many of them started with Mi Cometa over 15 years ago as children in their various educational and empowerment programs. Their current general secretary was one of these young people, and that to me is truly amazing.
The ownership, the power of voice and of right relationship, and the accountability is remarkably different with leaders who come from the community. These have been principles I've been trying to live more fully in my life, often with a lot of difficulty. Still, there are ways for people like me, I believe, and sometimes it just starts with a commitment to place.
There is indeed a wholeness, a holiness, a spirituality if you will, to place. I never learned this growing up in the bedroom community of Lake Oswego, outside Portland, Ore., but I grasped the idea during my college days and beyond. I remember moving back to Portland after a year organizing in Denver and, even with temporary minimum wage jobs, made a commitment to live there for five years. What a difference it made for my sense of meaning in community leadership.
I believe that everyone is a leader, yet it is true that there is a great diversity in the types of leaders we have. Here in this place, the coastal town of Guayaquil, I may be a leader, in part due to my association with UUSC, which is supporting Mi Cometa's campaign to promote water as a human right. But I am a behind-the-scenes, listening, colearning, coteaching, following-fill-in-the-gaps leader, and that feels right to me.
It is easy to feel the power of being American, and to take advantage of that privilege. It is hard to feel the power, and sustain a deep, authentic respect for the organizing here that seeks to understand the context, and recognizes the knowledge and autonomy of the community and leadership here. It is hard because it is easier to view the world only through my lens of experience, and it is hard because meaningful cross-cultural listening is difficult for me.
Yet, my Unitarian Universalist faith and community strengthens me, and it educates and encourages me.
