Illustration: Dave Zylstra
In 1988, seven Protestant parishes in Milwaukee’s inner city formed an organization that has used persuasion from their pulpits—and the force of their membership—to address the city’s unresolved social problems. That organization, Milwaukee Innercity Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH), had grown to nearly 40 member organizations representing Jewish, Islamic, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Unitarian congregations. In the years since its founding, MICAH has chalked up a long list of accomplishments in fulfillment of its motto: “To Do What Is Just!”
“I was part of the beginning,” recalls Rev. Marilyn Miller, president of MICAH and pastor of the Lutheran Church of the Reformation. Her work on behalf of justice and equity began within her own denomination “where pastors of color had different pay scales” than their white colleagues, but she had no doubt that those inequities were rooted in larger social problems.
“I was working for justice and that’s what you learned alongside the church: ‘You have to work for justice.’” She adds, “We work with the system but also agitate, which they sometimes don’t like.”
MICAH is part of the Gamaliel Network, a nationwide organization founded to “train community and faith leaders in building political power” and unite people of different ethnicities and religions in the pursuit of common goals for social change. “It uses Saul Alinsky’s organizational methods,” says Father Thomas Mueller, MICAH’s secretary and pastor of Saints Cyril & Methodious Orthodox Church. Alinsky was a 20th-century Chicago activist whose book, Rules for Radicals, remains an influential guide for community organizing. Alinsky stressed forceful non-violence and the importance of people working through organizations with shared values in pursuit of well-defined goals. As a community organizer in Chicago, the then unknown Barack Obama was inspired by Alinsky.
“MICAH isn’t a service organization,” Mueller continues. “It’s an advocacy group using methods that can involve tension. It can alienate politicians because we don’t ask for things. We demand them.”
Enough for Everybody
MICAH community organizer Lisa Jones elaborates. “Obviously, if people need food, you feed them, but the work that we do—we look at why don’t they have food? And if we want to change the system, how do we do that? How do we make it so that there is enough for everybody across the table, and no one is left out? What if we lived in a world—could you imagine a world with no [need for a] food pantry? That’s the kind of world that we are talking about and what we are advocating for.”
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“The issues MICAH fights for are grass roots—small enough to be attainable,” Mueller explains. He cites an example of a failed MICAH campaign to illustrate his point. “We spun our wheels on changing the state’s funding formula for Wisconsin’s public schools. We found we can’t do anything to make it more equitable as long as the Republicans control the Legislature. It was too big an issue! Sometimes what we do is very incremental, building from one thing to another.” He adds that MICAH doesn’t try to go it alone. “We are strategic about money and power, about building networks between people—about strategic coalitions.”
Illustrating that strategic coalition-building, MICAH joined the ACLU and the Black Health Coalition in a federal lawsuit. The coalition of groups won a ruling that funded the extension of bus lines during the reconstruction of the Zoo Interchange over the objections of Wisconsin’s cars-or-nothing Gov. Scott Walker. “Mass transit helps people find jobs,” Mueller says.
“MICAH and other groups also fought against [County Executive] Chris Abele’s attempt to sell the County Transit System to an out-of-state, for-profit corporation. We also fought against the scheme to take over Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) by special interests who wanted to carve out a for-profit system within MPS. If you take a critical mass of students out of MPS, it could collapse.”
People Power
Jones calls the attention MICAH brought to the problem of lead in the drinking water of Milwaukee’s older neighborhoods as “one of our biggest accomplishments. 53206,” she continues, “it has one of the highest levels of lead—especially children suffering from symptoms of lead poisoning.” Miller adds, “We helped encourage the City of Milwaukee to put in $250,000 for pilot programs for mothers coming out of hospitals with new babies to make sure they are drinking clean water in the bottles.”
MICAH is also working with Restoring Our Communities (ROC), a criminal justice campaign spurred by people who had been incarcerated. “Wisconsin is very backward. We have double the number of prisoners as Minnesota, which has similar demographics,” Mueller says. Many of the incarcerated are victims of punitive parole revocation policies or are “old prisoners” convicted before mandatory sentencing laws extended their expected terms of imprisonment for many additional years.
Says Jones, “We are working to advocate for those people to come home to their families—compassionate release for those who are incarcerated or ill… do we have enough drug treatment [programs]? How does mental health play into all this? If we had community programs, then fewer people would be incarcerated.”
Much of MICAH’s work involves mobilizing people in a show of support for reform. MICAH board member Mike Kostich recalls the group’s campaign to curb pay-day loan stores that prey on the poor. “We chartered buses and brought people to Madison. We went to hearings and talked to legislators. We made phone calls and pointed out what’s wrong with the system.”
One measure of MICAH’s political success is the career of one of Jones’ predecessors. Former MICAH community organizer Mandela Barnes became a member of the state assembly and is now Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor.
Progress on Many Fronts
The roster of accomplishments by MICAH and its many community partners is impressive. Working with the Good Jobs and Livable Neighborhoods Coalition, MICAH helped with the passage of the MORE (Milwaukee Opportunities for Restoring Employment) Ordinance, requiring “prevailing wages” for publicly contracted construction projects and preference for locally owned firms. Working with labor and other groups, MICAH gained approval from the County Board for PERC (Park East Redevelopment Compact), providing fair wages and affordable housing for the Park East Corridor development. As part of the Transitional Jobs Coalition, MICAH secured employer subsidies from the state for hiring unemployed people and giving them skills for their transition into the work force.
Collaborating with the African American Chamber of Commerce, MICAH established a certification program helping disadvantaged contractors get their feet up the ladder in the construction field. Working with WISDOM, a statewide network of faith groups, MICAH pushed to restore a 10% cut in the state budget for public transportation. And the list could continue.
The Role of Faith
Religious leaders have often taken a leading role in social reform, even when it meant challenging the laws of their time and place in the name of a higher morality. In American history, Quakers and other religiously minded abolitionists not only denounced slavery but helped slaves escape to Canada. A century later, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. became the voice for a civil rights movement with broad support across the spectrum of faith communities.
However, Mueller warns against the view that religious institutions are inevitably on the right side of history. “A lot of churches colluded with slavery and were involved in colonizing the Native Americans, stamping out native religions and cultures,” he says. “More recently, some churches were coopted by George W. Bush’s privation of public education through voucher and charter schools. You can’t work in a confrontational way with the government if you’re funded by the government.”
For MICAH’s member groups, religious faith requires an active participation—not just lip service—in bettering human lives. “I’m a faith person; we are an interfaith organization,” Jones says. “As I’m looking across the table [at MICAH meetings], I see men, women. I see black. I see white. I see Jewish. I see Muslim—and we are all talking about how we can do this justice work and how we can do it together on our faith values.”
MICAH’s leaders feel momentum behind them, even as they acknowledge the necessity to do more. “Tell people they are invited to join us; anybody can help. I want to extend the invitation, so we are bigger and stronger,” Miller says.
For more information about MICAH, call 414-264-0805 or visit micahmke.org.
