How are we different?

Our model of community organizing.

FOCUS is different from community organizations and agencies that provide charity services to meet community needs.  Instead, FOCUS develops leaders to speak for themselves and solve their own problems.  Our model includes the following activities: 

• One-to-one visits:  Personal interviews with hundreds of community residents to hear concerns, and identify priority issues (FOCUS staff and volunteers conduct approximately 100 visits per week). 
• Research:  leaders meet with public officials, key decision-makers, and diverse stakeholders to learn about the issue and brainstorm possible solutions. 
• Action: leaders organize large public meetings that bring community residents, officials, and others together to make solutions public. 

• Reflection: leaders evaluate their work and reflect on how their faith has grown, giving people the spiritual fuel to start next listening campaign. 

Congregation-based Community Organizing

Congregation-Based Community Organizing is a method of working with faith communities to address the problems and concerns of their communities, and in turn, vitalize and strengthen the life of congregations.

There are many paths to a more just world, and faith-based community organizing is one of them. Other paths include direct service, in which people respond to the immediate and often urgent physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of others. Another path is advocacy or activism, where people act and to speak on behalf of others who are suffering from great injustices and social ills.

FOCUS’s path to building a more just world involves teaching people of faith how to build and exercise their own power to address the root causes of the problems they face.  This struggle for justice is rooted in our faith traditions, which all call us to work for the benefit of Creation and our neighbors.

At the center of congregation-based community organizing is a belief in the potential for transformation – of people, institutions, and our larger culture. This belief stems directly from our rootedness in faith communities, and radiates throughout the organization, influencing the way FOCUS relates to public officials, to community members, and to one another.