What's at stake?
The new nonpartisan coalition brings faith, labor and civic leaders across the Central Valley to mobilize around the issues most important in their communities.
Martha Rodriguez-Torres, a parishioner at St. Anthony Mary Claret Church has been trying to raise concerns about dangerous traffic conditions near Chestnut and South avenues near Fowler.
She and other church members started holding meetings at their homes and at the church to listen to what their fellow church-goers had to say about their dangerous commutes. It’s where she learned that these traffic accidents were happening more often in unincorporated areas outside of the city.
They then had to identify who actually could change the situation. Church-goers and residents brought their concerts directly to county supervisors, the sheriff, the California Highway Patrol and other officials responsible for roadway safety, pressing them to address dangerous conditions on local roads.
The experience showed Rodriguez-Torres how local concerns can reveal broader community needs, which drew her to United San Joaquin (USJ) where she is now the board president.
It’s a new-to-Fresno coalition of faith, labor and civic leaders that are working together to organize residents in tackling the region’s most troubling issues, an offshoot of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a group founded by famed organizer Saul Alinsky in 1940.
“In light of the fact that our communities have become so divided, we have to work together,” Rodriguez-Torres said. “We cannot afford to just stay in our very segregated communities and say, ‘I don’t want to deal with them.’ We have to all work together to improve our community.”
And while they have yet to see the permanent changes they want in their neighborhoods, USJ organizers say, establishing relationships with the power brokers and government insiders has given the group new hope going forward.
Rodriguez-Torres said immigration, education and affordability consistently emerge as top concerns among parishioners at St. Anthony Mary Claret. Many families in the congregation work in agriculture, construction and service industries and are struggling with rising housing costs and economic uncertainty.
The long-standing concerns raised at St. Anthony Mary Claret Church reflect issues faced by communities across the region.
When the Rev. Tim Kutzmark of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Fresno first joined the USJ coalition, it stemmed from a growing aggravation with faith-based organizing in Fresno.
“I was feeling frustrated that there wasn’t an ongoing collaboration between congregations and other civic groups committed to social change and social justice in the valley,” Kutzmark said.
“What is exciting about United San Joaquin is that we are using an organizing model with an 86-year track record of national success [and] our founding institutions are committed to each other based on meaningful personal relationships developed over time to sustain us over time.”
Fresno politics has long been shaped by both progressive and conservative faith-based organizations. Faith in the Valley was deeply involved in battles over the last decade on housing habitability and affordability, even the city’s general plan. Fresno Pacific’s Center for Community Transformation has also been involved in efforts to shape city policy to support more investment in older neighborhoods.
And faith-based organizations are deeply embedded in the city’s social service nonprofits, too.
Kutzmark says the organization’s strength lies in bringing together people who otherwise might never work together. Faith congregations, labor unions and nonprofits have spent years building relationships through thousands of one-on-one conversations and house meetings that ultimately shaped the coalition’s priorities.
While the USJ coalition has identified six priority areas, such as immigration and education, Kutzmark said the coalition’s members will democratically decide which priorities to pursue first based on where institutions have the most energy and capacity.
“I got so excited after some decades of work and not really seeing systemic change in Fresno,” Kutzmark said. “It was like this might be the tool that will actually shift some of the balance of power in Fresno and the Central Valley in favor of people.”
For members of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Fresno, housing has emerged as one of the most pressing concerns.
President Donald Trump’s recent budget proposal, which would bring budget cuts to national affordable-housing and rental-assistance programs, would jeopardize housing for thousands of people, including in Fresno. California has long struggled to build enough housing to meet demand, and that shortage remains one of the leading causes of rising housing costs across the state.
Kutzmark said congregants are particularly focused on the region’s shortage of affordable housing, as well as opposition to the Southeast Development Area Specific Plan, Mayor Jerry Dyer’s massive development sprawl plan which the group says diverts investment from existing neighborhoods.
Kutzmark said many in the congregation are concerned that continued expansion on the city’s outskirts could deepen inequities by pushing resources and opportunities farther from communities that have already experienced years of disinvestment.
Dr. Manju Peters, a member of Wesley United Methodist Church, said what drew her to USJ was that the coalition’s priorities emerged from stories shared by residents rather than a top-down agenda.
Among the concerns raised in her congregation were students struggling with rising costs and housing insecurity, and the growing challenge of paying for college. Those conversations helped shape the coalition’s focus on education, housing and immigration.
“Nobody from outside needs to come and tell us what we need or what we need to be doing,” Peters said. “We can build our own when we have a voice.”
Peters said her involvement with USJ is rooted in her experiences as an immigrant and educator. She became a U.S. citizen only a few years ago and said citizenship deepened her sense of responsibility to engage in public life.
“There’s a lot more that binds us that is common than divides us,” Peters said. “The answer is in organizing, the answer is in coming together and saying, ‘OK, what are the issues that are facing our communities, and how can we do something about it?’”
At a June 1 delegate assembly at St. Paul Catholic Newman Center, USJ members approved the organization’s $468,000 budget and selected the issues that will guide their work over the next year: immigration, housing and land use, and education.
Participating institutions were asked to commit to two or three issue areas, and 18 organizations pledged financial support for the effort. The self-funded structure, USJ leaders said, encourages decision-making that remains in the hands of local institutions rather than outside donors. They also have received grants from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, the Irvine Foundation, and The California Endowment.
The immigration team plans to expand know-your-rights workshops and explore ways to recruit more attorneys to handle habeas corpus petitions for people held in ICE detention.
The housing and land use team will explore ways to expand affordable housing and homeownership opportunities. The team will also examine land-use policies, including SEDA, to ensure local governments are investing in needed infrastructure.
The education team will examine public education budgets, funding sources, and how these investments affect students and communities.
At the invitation of local interfaith leaders, IAF organizers began working with San Joaquin Valley residents in 2020 to build USJ.
Tim McManus, senior organizer of the IAF, says their goal is to train, mentor and support local leaders to build their own community power, not drive the agenda.
“The people in this community know their interests, they know what they care about, they know their community, they know their institutions,” McManus said. “They don’t need an outside organizer to come in and tell them what to do.”
Many IAF-affiliated groups have at times been criticized by conservatives who argue that the network advances a progressively political agenda.
McManus pointed to Communities Organized for Relational Power in Action (COPA), an IAF-affiliated organization on the Central Coast that helped create California’s first large-scale healthcare program for undocumented immigrants after listening to the stories of hundreds of residents without insurance.
The Rev. Dennis Hutson, minister at two United Methodist churches in Porterville, first became involved in faith-based community organizing while serving a church in Las Vegas after retiring from the Air Force as a chaplain in 2007.
“I always knew early in my life that I was going to be a part of some type of effort to work with mobilizing people toward justice issues,” Hutson said. “The church does not exist unto itself, it exists because of the people who live in the community around it.”
After moving to the Central Valley in 2017 to care for his mother in Allensworth, Hutson became involved with what would eventually become USJ during the 2023 floods that threatened the historic Tulare County community. Looking for support and resources, he connected with organizers and local leaders who were building the regional coalition.
“I think as people hear stories from one another, you have people all of a sudden realizing that this is a broader concern than they may have ever realized,” Hutson said. “You’re able to build not only the relationship and trust, but you are able now to empathize with others and get more and more people involved in how to change things.”
