Inside the third-floor converted classroom in Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, down the hall from where a teacher is giving violin lessons to a group of students creaking their way through Mozart, a community organizer, a registered nurse and a maintenance man are plotting national political strategy.
The three, part of a grassroots community-activism group called the Metro Organizations for People, talk about trying to give immigrants – legal and illegal – better access to affordable housing and health care. They want to figure out how to get more underprivileged children enrolled in low-income health care programs. They want to improve public safety.
And, even as they pause frequently to allow an interpreter to translate back and forth from Spanish to English, they talk about ways to become closer, become one community – immigrant and citizen, rich and poor, minority and majority.
This week, they are taking the campaign assembled here to Washington, D.C.
“We have found we can work our brains out in our local communities and have it taken away like that because of something they do in Washington,” said Sharon Bridgeforth, a MOP community organizer, in whose office this meeting is taking place. “That’s why we’re going. Because we know they have to hear us there so we can continue the good work we’re doing here.”
Bridgeforth and 17 other members of MOP – including the maintenance man, the nurse, a priest and three illegal immigrants who must travel by train to avoid immigration entanglements – are in Washington this week to meet with several Colorado senators and representatives. They will be one group among dozens from across the country affiliated with the PICO, or People Improving Communities through Organizing, grassroots network meeting with elected officials in what is being called the PICO New Voices Leadership Conference. In total, there will be about 400 true believers who will descend on a town where a grin-and-grip handshake is often only a prelude to a stab in the back.
This is faith-based politics, but of a different variety. Churches make up a large share of the MOP’s membership. And although these aren’t the issues that typically get attention in the religious politics discussion, Bridgeforth said participants are called by faith to bring their concerns to Washington to fight for better lives for people in Denver.
Gordon Duvall, the nurse, who works with a group called the National Fatherhood Initiative, said going to Washington and holding meetings with the elected officials is an important step toward showing communities that individuals can have an impact. He is sitting next to Herman Colato, who immigrated to America nine years ago from El Salvador and works as a maintenance man in Commerce City. Colato, speaking through an interpreter, said residents must pressure their elected officials to work for them or else lose their ear to deep-pocketed interests.
“I think from a strategy standpoint,” Duvall said, “with all of these different people coming to Washington at the same time with the same problems, no, they don’t have to listen to us – but if they don’t, what does that say about us as a society?”
“We have to let them see us,” Colato said.
“It just gives me goosebumps,” Bridgeforth said.
Staff writer John Ingold can be reached at 720-929-0898 or jingold@denverpost.com.
