How to Organize a Neighborhood When Everyone Is Exhausted

Organizing a neighborhood is not a campaign. It is a form of accompaniment. In East Los Angeles, where I have buried parishioners and celebrated quinceañeras on the same block, the work of tenant rights, land-use policy, and restorative justice does not begin with a rally. It begins with the recognition that people are tired. Not lazy. Tired. There is a difference, and the difference matters if you want to build anything that lasts.

What I am describing here is low-threshold neighborhood organizing: a way of building collective power that assumes most people are already carrying too much. It is rooted in the parish hall, the laundromat, the school pickup line, and the sidewalk outside the taco stand. It is not a method for professional organizers with grants and staff. It is a method for neighbors who want to stay neighbors.

This article is for the person who wants to stop a bad eviction, slow a predatory rezoning, or open a restorative justice circle in a parish basement, but who also has a shift at the hospital, a parent to care for, and a child who needs help with homework. If that is you, keep reading. If you are looking for a five-step plan that ignores grief, skip this one.

Start With the People Who Are Already Showing Up

Every neighborhood has a hidden attendance sheet. It is not the sign-in sheet from the last meeting. It is the list of people who show up when someone dies, when someone is locked out, when a child is missing, when the water is shut off. Those people are your organizing committee. They may not call themselves that. They may not want to. But they are the ones who already know that love is a form of labor.

In my parish, the most reliable organizers are not the people with the most free time. They are the people with the most practice. The grandmother who has buried two sons and still brings food to the bereaved. The young father who works nights but shows up to translate at the housing clinic. The teenager who knows every elder on the block by name. These are the people who understand that organizing is not an extra activity. It is a continuation of what they already do.

Do not start by recruiting new people. Start by naming the people who are already doing the work. Tell them you see them. Ask them what they need. Then ask if they want to do one small thing together. Not a big thing. One small thing.

The One-Small-Thing Rule

Exhausted people cannot commit to a six-month campaign. They can commit to a phone call. They can commit to a walk around the block. They can commit to sitting in the back of a meeting and listening. The one-small-thing rule is simple: every gathering ends with one concrete, time-bound, low-energy action that a person can do without rearranging their life.

Examples from our parish:

• Text one neighbor the date of the next rent stabilization workshop.
• Put a flyer in the window of the corner store, with the owner’s permission.
• Bring a folding chair to the courtyard meeting.
• Write down one question about the new development proposal and give it to the person who will attend the planning hearing.

None of these actions require a training. None of them require a budget. All of them build the muscle of showing up.

Name the Exhaustion Before You Name the Enemy

There is a temptation in organizing to move quickly from pain to anger. Anger is useful. It can be holy. But anger without acknowledgment of exhaustion becomes burnout. People need to hear that their tiredness is not a moral failure. It is a reasonable response to unreasonable conditions.

In East Los Angeles, many of our neighbors are working two or three jobs. Many are caring for elders and children at the same time. Many are undocumented and carrying the fear of a knock on the door. Many are grieving. If you do not name that reality, your meeting will feel like another demand. And people will stop coming.

So begin with a simple practice. At the start of a gathering, do not ask for introductions. Ask for a check-in. One sentence. “What are you carrying tonight?” Let people say it. Do not fix it. Do not turn it into a strategy session. Just let it be said. This is not therapy. It is truth-telling. And truth-telling is the foundation of any organizing that will survive contact with reality.

The Liturgical Calendar as a Pacing Tool

I am a priest, so I think in seasons. The liturgical calendar is not just for worship. It is a pacing tool. Advent is a season of waiting. Lent is a season of repentance and return. Ordinary Time is a season of steady, unglamorous work. Organizing has seasons too. There are seasons for listening, seasons for confrontation, seasons for mourning, seasons for celebration. If you try to make every season a season of confrontation, you will burn out your people and yourself.

In our parish, we do not hold major tenant actions during Holy Week. We do not schedule big meetings in the week after a neighborhood death. We do not ask people to testify at a hearing the same week their child is taking final exams. This is not weakness. It is wisdom. The work will still be there next week. The people may not be.

Use the Places People Already Gather

Do not ask exhausted people to come to a new place. Go to the places they already are. The laundromat. The school parking lot. The bus stop. The line outside the food pantry. The parish hall after Mass. The sidewalk where the paletero stops. These are the true community centers of East Los Angeles.

One of the most effective tenant rights conversations I have ever witnessed happened in a laundromat on Cesar Chavez Avenue. A woman was folding clothes. Another woman asked her if she had heard about the rent increase. They talked for ten minutes. By the end, the second woman had the phone number for the housing clinic and a plan to bring her lease to the next workshop. No flyer. No meeting. Just a conversation in a place where people already were.

This is what I mean by low-threshold organizing. It does not require a venue. It requires presence. It requires the willingness to talk to people where they are, about the things they are already worried about.

Build a Memory Bank, Not Just a Contact List

Most organizing advice tells you to build a contact list. Names, phone numbers, emails. That is useful. But it is not enough. A contact list tells you who to call. A memory bank tells you who you are. It is the collection of stories, names, dates, and places that make a neighborhood a neighborhood.

In our parish, we keep a memory bank. It is not a database. It is a set of practices. We remember the names of the dead at every All Souls’ Day. We keep photos of the old buildings that were torn down. We record the stories of the elders who remember when the neighborhood was different. We do this not out of nostalgia, but out of a conviction that people who know their own history are harder to displace.

Cultural memory is a form of resistance. When a developer says that a block has no history, the memory bank says otherwise. When a landlord says that a tenant has no roots, the memory bank says otherwise. When a city planner says that a neighborhood is blighted, the memory bank says otherwise. Memory is not a luxury. It is a tool.

How to Start a Memory Bank Without Adding a Meeting

You do not need a new committee. You need a new habit. Here are three habits that work:

• At every gathering, ask one person to share one memory of the block. One minute. No discussion. Just listening.
• Take photos of the ordinary things: the corner store, the mural, the tree that everyone parks under. Put them in a shared album.
• When someone dies, write down their name and one thing they did for the neighborhood. Keep it in a notebook. Read it aloud once a year.

These habits do not require a grant. They require attention. And attention is something exhausted people can give in small doses, if they know it matters.

Restorative Justice in the Parish Setting

Restorative justice is often talked about as a program. It is better understood as a posture. It is the posture of asking, “Who has been harmed? What do they need? Whose obligation is it to meet that need?” instead of asking, “What rule was broken? Who broke it? How do we punish them?”

In a parish setting, restorative justice can take many forms. A circle for young people who have been in fights. A conversation between a landlord and a tenant, mediated by neighbors. A process for welcoming someone back after incarceration. A way of addressing harm within the congregation without resorting to shame or exclusion.

The key is to keep it small. Restorative justice circles work best with eight to twelve people, a clear talking piece, and a simple set of questions. They do not work well when they are rushed, when they are used as a substitute for accountability, or when they are imposed on people who are not ready.

One of the most powerful circles I have witnessed in our parish involved a young man who had vandalized a neighbor’s car. The neighbor did not want to call the police. The young man’s mother did not want him to have a record. We sat in a circle in the parish hall. The neighbor talked about what the car meant to him. The young man talked about what was going on in his life. The mother talked about her fear. By the end, the young man had agreed to pay for the damage over time and to help the neighbor with yard work for a month. It was not a program. It was a parish being a parish.

Tenant Rights and Land-Use Policy: The Slow Work of Staying

In East Los Angeles, the fight over land is not abstract. It is the fight over whether a family can stay in the home where they have lived for twenty years. It is the fight over whether a corner store becomes a luxury apartment building. It is the fight over whether a neighborhood keeps its character or becomes a place where the people who built it can no longer afford to live.

Tenant rights organizing is often framed as a legal battle. It is that. But it is also a spiritual battle. It is the battle to believe that you have a right to stay. That your presence matters. That your neighborhood is not just a place where you sleep, but a place where you belong.

When we organize around tenant rights, we do not start with the law. We start with the story. We ask people to tell us what their home means to them. We ask them to tell us what they are afraid of. We ask them to tell us what they would fight for. Then we connect them to the legal resources, the policy campaigns, and the neighbors who can help.

Land-use policy can feel like a foreign language. Zoning. Density. Setbacks. Variances. CEQA. These words are designed to exclude people. Our job is to translate them. Not to dumb them down, but to make them accessible. A neighbor who understands what a zoning change means for her block is a neighbor who can speak at a hearing. A neighbor who can speak at a hearing is a neighbor who can change the outcome.

What to Do When You Cannot Do Everything

You cannot stop every eviction. You cannot block every bad development. You cannot fix every broken system. You will fail. You will lose. You will bury people you tried to save. This is the truth of organizing in a place like East Los Angeles. If you cannot hold that truth, you will not last.

So what do you do when you cannot do everything? You do the next thing. You make the next phone call. You attend the next hearing. You sit with the next family. You pray the next prayer. You do not do everything. You do the next thing. And you trust that the next thing, done with love, is enough for today.

What This Means for the Parish

The parish is not a building. It is a people. And the people are tired. So the parish must become a place where tired people can rest without being judged. A place where the work of justice is not a burden but a shared vocation. A place where the memory of the dead and the needs of the living are held together.

This means the parish must be willing to change. Fewer meetings. More meals. Less programming. More presence. Less talk about mission. More living of mission. The parish that organizes a neighborhood when everyone is exhausted is not the parish with the best strategic plan. It is the parish that knows how to sit with people in the dark and wait for the dawn.

I have no illusions about the difficulty of this work. I have seen it break people. I have seen it break me. But I have also seen it save people. I have seen a woman who was about to be evicted find the courage to fight because her neighbors stood with her. I have seen a young man who was headed for prison find a different path because a circle of elders refused to give up on him. I have seen a block that was written off as blighted become a place of pride because the people who lived there decided to remember who they were.

That is the work. It is slow. It is unglamorous. It is holy. And it is possible, even when everyone is exhausted. Especially when everyone is exhausted. Because exhaustion is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of a different kind of story. A story about a people who learned to carry each other. A story about a neighborhood that refused to disappear. A story about a God who does not abandon the tired.

Frequently Asked Questions

What if no one shows up to the first meeting?

Do not panic. Do not cancel the work. Ask yourself if the meeting was the right shape. Was it at a time when people could actually come? Was it in a place where people felt safe? Was it about something people actually care about? Then try a different shape. A shorter meeting. A different day. A conversation instead of a meeting. A walk around the block. The absence of people is information. Use it.

How do you organize when you yourself are exhausted?

You do less. You do it with others. You name your own exhaustion out loud. You ask for help. You lower the bar. You remember that the goal is not to be a hero. The goal is to be faithful. Faithfulness is measured in small acts, not in grand victories. If all you can do this week is pray and make one phone call, do that. It is enough.

What is the difference between organizing and just being a good neighbor?

Being a good neighbor is the foundation. Organizing is what happens when good neighbors decide to act together on a shared problem. The difference is not in the quality of the love. It is in the direction of the action. A good neighbor brings soup when you are sick. An organized neighbor also asks why the landlord has not fixed the heat. Both are necessary. Neither is sufficient alone.

How do you keep restorative justice from becoming a way to avoid accountability?

Restorative justice is not a substitute for accountability. It is a different form of accountability. The key is to keep the focus on harm and needs, not on punishment and forgiveness. The person who caused harm must be willing to acknowledge what they did and to take concrete steps to make it right. If they are not willing, the circle should not proceed. Restorative justice is not a way to let people off the hook. It is a way to put the hook in the right place.

A Next Step for This Blog

This article is the first in what I hope will be a recurring column on low-threshold organizing. In the coming weeks, I will write about how to run a tenant rights workshop in a parish hall without a lawyer, how to read a zoning notice when you do not speak planner, and how to start a memory bank in a neighborhood that is changing too fast. If you have a question or a story from your own block, send it to me. I will read it. I may not be able to answer every letter, but I will carry every story.

Until then, do the next thing. And know that you are not doing it alone.

In East Los Angeles, a community garden is not a landscaping project. It is a small act of territorial reclamation. When I bless a garden bed behind Our Lady of Soledad, I am not blessing tomatoes. I am blessing the right of a grandmother to feed her grandchildren without asking permission from a landlord, a city planner, or a grocery chain that decided her zip code was not profitable enough. Food sovereignty is the name for that right. It sits alongside tenant rights, land-use policy, and restorative justice as one of the pillars of a parish that refuses to be a waiting room for displacement.

Food sovereignty is the ability of a community to control its own food system: what is grown, who grows it, who eats it, and on what terms. The term came out of the global peasant movement La Vía Campesina in the 1990s, but the practice is older than any policy paper. It is the victory garden of a wartime widow. It is the milpa of a Mixtec family in Boyle Heights. It is the raised bed behind a rent-controlled apartment building where a tenant who cannot afford a lawyer still knows how to save seeds. When we talk about community gardens in this parish, we are not talking about a hobby. We are talking about a defense against hunger that is also a defense against erasure.

I have buried parishioners who died waiting for a liver transplant and parishioners who died waiting for a rent check to clear. I have also watched a twelve-year-old girl cry because the cucumber she planted from seed was eaten by a squirrel before she could harvest it. Both griefs are real. The garden does not solve the first one. But it does something about the second one, and that something is not small. It teaches a child that she can participate in the production of her own nourishment. That is a theological statement. It is also a political one.

What a Garden Actually Produces

A community garden produces vegetables, yes. But it also produces something less visible: a reason for neighbors to stay on the same block. When a landlord files an Ellis Act eviction, the first thing that disappears is not the building. It is the network of people who knew each other’s names. The garden is one of the few places where that network can be rebuilt without a permit. It is a commons, and a commons is a threat to anyone who profits from isolation.

In our parish, the garden behind the sacristy is not owned by the parish. It is held in trust by a committee of tenants, seniors, and youth. The committee decides what to plant, how to distribute the harvest, and who gets a bed when someone moves away. That structure matters. If the garden were run by the pastor alone, it would be a charity project. Run by the people who eat from it, it becomes a small government. And small governments are how people learn to govern larger things, like a neighborhood council or a rent board.

The Difference Between a Food Bank and a Food System

A food bank gives a family a box of canned goods. A food system decides whether that family’s neighborhood has a grocery store, a farmers market, or a garden. East Los Angeles has more fast-food outlets per square mile than many wealthier parts of the city, and fewer full-service grocery stores. That is not an accident. It is a land-use decision made by people who do not live here. A community garden is a small correction to that decision. It does not replace a grocery store. But it changes the question from “What can we get?” to “What can we grow?”

When a parishioner named Marta started growing nopales in a raised bed, she was not trying to make a political statement. She was trying to feed her diabetic husband something that would not spike his blood sugar. But the nopales did make a political statement. They said: this plant belongs here. This food belongs here. This woman belongs here. And when the landlord tried to raise her rent by forty percent, the garden committee wrote a letter. It did not stop the rent increase. But it told the landlord that Marta was not alone. That is what food sovereignty looks like in a rent-controlled building. It looks like a letter signed by twelve people who have eaten her nopales.

Land Use Is a Food Issue

Every community garden in Los Angeles sits on land that could have been something else. A parking lot. A condominium. A vacant lot waiting for a developer to call it an opportunity zone. The fact that a garden exists at all is a land-use decision, and it is a decision that can be reversed. I have seen gardens bulldozed because a property owner found a better offer. I have seen gardens saved because a parish council refused to sell. The difference is not luck. It is organization.

In 2012, the city of Los Angeles adopted a Community Garden Policy to make it easier for vacant city-owned lots to be used for gardens. The policy was a victory for groups like the Los Angeles Community Garden Council, which has supported gardens across the county for decades. But a policy is only as strong as the people who enforce it. When a garden is threatened, the first question is not “What does the policy say?” The first question is “Who is willing to show up at a hearing?”

That is why the garden committee at Our Lady of Soledad keeps a list of every member’s phone number, and why we practice making phone calls before we need to make phone calls. It is why we invite the local council office to the harvest festival, not to ask for anything, but so that when we do ask, the staffer already knows our names. That is not cynical. That is how land-use policy works in a city where land is the most valuable thing a poor person does not own.

Restorative Justice in the Garden

Restorative justice is usually discussed in the context of crime: a circle where a victim and an offender meet, where harm is named, and where repair is attempted. But the garden is also a place of restorative justice. It restores a relationship that has been broken: the relationship between a person and the land that feeds them. For many of our parishioners, that relationship was broken by migration, by poverty, by the simple fact that they live in apartments with no dirt. The garden restores it, one season at a time.

I have seen a young man on probation spend an afternoon turning compost and leave with his shoulders lower than when he arrived. I have seen a woman who had not spoken to her sister in three years start speaking to her again over a shared row of chiles. The garden does not force reconciliation. It creates the conditions for it. That is what restorative justice means in practice: not a program, but a place where people can practice being in right relationship with each other and with the earth.

The Liturgical Calendar and the Growing Season

The Church has its own calendar, and the garden has its own. They do not always align, but when they do, the result is a kind of preaching that does not need words. During Lent, we plant. During Easter, we harvest the first greens. During Ordinary Time, we weed. During Advent, we let the soil rest. The garden becomes a catechesis of patience, which is the virtue most needed by anyone who has ever tried to organize tenants or change a zoning law.

On the feast of St. Isidore the Farmer, we bless the tools. On the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, we plant roses, because roses are the sign she gave to Juan Diego, and because roses grow well in this climate. These are not decorations. They are reminders that the land is sacred, and that the people who work it are doing sacred work, even when the work is just pulling weeds.

What Food Sovereignty Requires

Food sovereignty requires more than a garden. It requires a community that can defend the garden. It requires tenants who know their rights, and who know that a garden is not a substitute for rent control. It requires a parish that is willing to use its land for the benefit of the neighborhood, not just for the benefit of the parish budget. It requires a city that treats vacant lots as public resources, not as private opportunities. And it requires a church that remembers that the first question God asks in the Garden of Eden is not “What did you do?” but “Where are you?”

We are here. We are in East Los Angeles. We are growing food on land that was once a parking lot, and we are not asking permission to be hungry. That is the beginning of food sovereignty. The vegetables are just the evidence.

Practical Steps for a Parish Garden

If your parish or neighborhood wants to start a garden, do not start with seeds. Start with a meeting. Ask who is hungry, who has time, who has knowledge, and who has land. The answers will tell you whether you are starting a garden or a fight. Sometimes it is both.

1. Find the Land and the Landlord

Every garden needs a site, and every site has an owner. The owner may be the city, the county, a private landlord, or the parish itself. Find out who owns the land before you put a shovel in it. In Los Angeles, the County Assessor’s office has a parcel map that can tell you who owns any piece of land. If the land is owned by the city, the Community Garden Policy may apply. If it is owned by a private landlord, you will need a lease, and you will need to read it carefully. A garden lease should be long enough to justify the work: at least five years, preferably ten.

2. Test the Soil

Urban soil can be contaminated with lead, arsenic, and other heavy metals, especially in neighborhoods with old housing stock and heavy traffic. Before you plant anything edible, test the soil. The University of California Cooperative Extension offers soil testing services, and many community garden organizations can help you interpret the results. If the soil is contaminated, do not despair. Raised beds with clean soil are a common solution, and they are also easier on the knees of older gardeners.

3. Build a Committee, Not a Club

A garden club is a group of people who like to garden. A garden committee is a group of people who are accountable to each other and to the neighborhood. The committee should have a written agreement that covers who gets a bed, how long they can keep it, what happens if they abandon it, and how disputes are resolved. This is not bureaucracy. It is the difference between a garden that lasts ten years and a garden that lasts one summer.

4. Grow What People Eat

Do not grow kale because it is trendy. Grow what the people in your neighborhood actually eat. In East Los Angeles, that means chiles, tomatoes, nopales, cilantro, squash, and corn. Ask the elders what they grew in their home countries. Ask the children what they will actually put in their mouths. A garden full of food nobody wants is a garden that will be abandoned by August.

5. Plan for the Harvest

A garden produces more than any one family can eat, and it produces it all at once. Decide early how the harvest will be distributed. Some gardens give each gardener a share and donate the rest to a food pantry. Some gardens sell the surplus at a farm stand and use the money for water and tools. Some gardens do both. The important thing is that the decision is made by the committee, not by the pastor or the funder.

The Garden as a Parish Ministry

A parish garden is not a social service program. It is a ministry, which means it is a place where people encounter God and each other. The encounter may happen while planting seeds, while arguing about the water bill, or while sitting on a bench watching the tomatoes ripen. It is not always peaceful. Ministry is not always peaceful. But it is always real.

When I stand in the garden on a Saturday morning, I see the parish the way it should be: old and young, Spanish-speaking and English-speaking, homeowners and tenants, all doing the same work. The garden does not erase the differences. It just gives the differences something to do together. That is more than most programs can claim.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is food sovereignty, and how is it different from food security?

Food security means having enough food to eat. Food sovereignty means having control over the food system that feeds you. A family can be food secure while eating only what a food bank gives them. That same family is not food sovereign unless they have a say in what is grown, where it is grown, and who profits from it. Community gardens are one small step toward food sovereignty because they put the means of production in the hands of the people who eat the food.

Do community gardens actually help with tenant rights?

They can, but not automatically. A garden gives tenants a reason to organize and a place to meet. It builds relationships that can be activated when a landlord threatens eviction or a rent increase. But a garden is not a substitute for knowing your rights under the Los Angeles Rent Stabilization Ordinance or for joining a tenants union. The garden is a tool, not a solution. It works best when it is connected to a broader organizing effort.

What if our parish does not have land for a garden?

Look for land that is not being used: a vacant lot, a schoolyard, a parkway strip, a rooftop. Talk to the owner. Talk to your city council office. Talk to the Los Angeles Community Garden Council, which has helped start gardens on all kinds of land. If there is truly no land, start with containers on a sidewalk or a balcony. The point is not the size of the garden. The point is the practice of growing food together and the relationships that practice creates.

Is a community garden a form of restorative justice?

It can be. Restorative justice is about repairing harm and restoring relationships. A garden restores the relationship between people and the land, between neighbors who have been isolated, and between a community and its own history. It is not a replacement for a formal restorative justice process, but it can be a place where the values of restorative justice are practiced in daily life.

What Comes Next

This article is the first in a series on food sovereignty and land use in East Los Angeles. The next article will look at the history of community gardens in Boyle Heights, from the victory gardens of the 1940s to the displacement fights of the present. If you have a story about a garden in your neighborhood, or if your parish is thinking about starting one, write to me. The garden is not a metaphor. It is a place. And places need people who will defend them.

When I bless a new community garden, I am not sprinkling holy water on a patch of dirt so we can have prettier tomatoes. I am consecrating ground for a fight. The fight is for food sovereignty—the right of a neighborhood to control its own food system, to grow what it needs, and to refuse the plastic-wrapped, overpriced, nutritionally hollow options that the market pushes into a zip code like ours. A garden is a declaration that we will not be forever dependent on the corner store that sells more liquor than milk. It is a quiet, leafy act of resistance against a land-use policy that has, for decades, treated our parish boundaries as a sacrifice zone.

I have buried too many parishioners whose bodies gave out from a diet shaped by scarcity and displacement. I have also watched a grandmother teach a teenager how to save seeds from a chayote, and in that moment, I saw the restoration of something that pavement and freeway construction tried to erase. This is not about a hobby. This is about who controls the food, the land, and the memory of how to feed a people.

When a Zucchini Is More Than a Zucchini

In a neighborhood where the nearest full-service grocery store is a forty-minute bus ride away, a garden bed of calabacitas is a direct challenge to the food desert label. But I have come to dislike that term. A desert is a natural ecosystem. What we have in East L.A. is a food apartheid—a man-made condition where access to fresh, affordable, culturally appropriate food is denied based on race, class, and the calculated neglect of zoning boards. A community garden does not just fill a gap; it begins to dismantle the logic that created the gap. It says: we can feed ourselves, on our own land, with our own knowledge.

Food sovereignty, a concept articulated powerfully by the international peasant movement La Vía Campesina, centers on the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture systems. It places the people who produce, distribute, and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations. In our context, this means prioritizing the growing of nopales, epazote, and maíz criollo over ornamental flowers. It means the abuelas who remember the milpa system teaching the younger generation that the soil is not a blank slate, but a living conversation with our ancestors.

The Roots of Hunger in East Los Angeles

To understand why a garden is a political act, you must understand the history of the land it sits on. Our parish, Our Lady of Solitude, sits in the shadow of freeway interchanges that were bulldozed through thriving Mexican-American communities in the 1950s and 60s. Eminent domain scattered families. Corner stores that once sold fresh produce from local farms were replaced by fast-food chains. The knowledge of how to grow food—knowledge that many of our elders carried from rural Mexico—was not lost; it was paved over.

This is the context of hunger here. It is not a natural disaster. It is a policy disaster. The garden, then, is a form of restorative justice. We are not just growing food; we are reclaiming the land’s memory. We are restoring a relationship that was severed by redlining, displacement, and the deliberate underinvestment that followed. When a parishioner plants a row of maíz, she is planting a flag of cultural survival.

From Food Desert to Food Apartheid

The term “food desert” implies a natural absence. But there is nothing natural about the lack of fresh food in a community that sits less than twenty miles from some of the richest agricultural land in the world. The correct term is food apartheid, because it is the result of deliberate economic and racial segregation. Supermarket redlining—the practice of major chains refusing to build stores in low-income neighborhoods of color—created the conditions we live with today. The garden is our response: a refusal to accept that our only options are processed, shelf-stable, and diabetes-inducing.

In our parish garden, we grow food that heals. Nopales for blood sugar regulation. Verdolagas, a wild green that many call a weed, but which our elders know is rich in omega-3s. These are not just vegetables; they are a pharmacopoeia rooted in indigenous knowledge. The garden becomes a clinic without walls, a place where health is cultivated rather than medicated after the fact.

Land Use Policy as a Spiritual Matter

In the Book of Leviticus, the land is not a commodity to be bought and sold in perpetuity. It is a gift from God, and the people are tenants, stewards of a sacred trust. The Jubilee year commanded that land be returned to its original families, a radical economic reset designed to prevent the permanent accumulation of wealth and the permanent dispossession of the poor. When I look at the zoning maps of our city, I see a direct violation of that biblical principle. Industrial uses are concentrated in our neighborhoods. Polluting facilities are permitted next to our schools. Vacant lots, owned by absentee speculators, sit idle while our children go hungry.

Our garden sits on a lot that was once slated for a self-storage facility. The parish organized. We attended zoning hearings. We brought the abuelas to testify, not as victims, but as experts on what the land needed to become. We won a temporary use permit, and then another. Now we are pushing for a community land trust that would take the soil out of the speculative market permanently. This is the long game of food sovereignty: not just growing food, but changing who decides what the land is for.

Tools for the Work: Policy and Practice

For other parishes and community groups looking to start this journey, the path is both practical and political. Here are some of the tools we have used:

• Community Land Trusts (CLTs): A model where land is owned collectively by a nonprofit, ensuring it remains affordable and community-controlled in perpetuity. The National Community Land Trust Network offers resources for starting a CLT.
• Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones: California’s AB 551 allows cities to offer property tax reductions for landowners who dedicate vacant parcels to agricultural use for at least five years. This can turn an eyesore into a food source.
• Seed Saving Libraries: We maintain a parish seed library focused on heirloom varieties from Mesoamerica. This is a direct act of cultural preservation, ensuring that the genetic heritage of our food is not owned by agribusiness.

The Liturgical Year in the Soil

Our garden calendar follows the liturgical year, not just the seasons. During Lent, we prepare the soil and plant the seeds, a physical act of penance and hope. The first shoots often break ground around Easter, a small resurrection we can touch. By Pentecost, the garden is a riot of green, a visible sign of the Spirit’s life-giving breath. On the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in December, we harvest the last of the winter squash and gather to make tamales, wrapping the masa in corn husks from our own milpa. The garden becomes a catechism: the cycle of death and resurrection, the Eucharist as the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands, the communion of saints that includes the ancestors who first domesticated these plants.

This is not symbolism for its own sake. It is a pedagogy. When a child sees that the corn for the parish festival comes from the lot next door, she learns that God’s providence is not abstract. It is soil, water, sun, and the labor of her neighbors. That is a lesson no textbook can teach.

When the City Pushes Back

Food sovereignty inevitably collides with the machinery of land-use control. Last year, the city cited our garden for “unpermitted structures”—our tool shed and a shade ramada where we hold nutrition classes. The shed was built by parishioners. The ramada was a gift from a local carpenter whose father was deported. The citation was not about safety; it was about a system that cannot see a community-built space as legitimate unless it has paid fees and filled out forms designed for commercial developers.

We fought the citation. We organized a “garden court” on the actual site, with the abuelas sitting in the jury box and the city inspector invited to walk the rows and taste a tomato. He didn’t come. But the council member did, and the citation was eventually dropped. This is the other harvest of a community garden: political power. When people work the soil together, they learn to speak together. They show up at land-use hearings. They run for neighborhood council. The garden grows organizers as surely as it grows calabacitas.

Restorative Justice, One Row at a Time

We have also opened our garden to young people completing community service hours through the county’s restorative justice program. Instead of picking up trash on a freeway on-ramp, they learn to build raised beds and compost. They work alongside elders who remember farming in their home countries. The garden becomes a place of reparation—not just for the harm the young person caused, but for the harm the community has endured. It is a small, imperfect attempt to model what a just food system looks like: everyone fed, everyone contributing, the land restored.

This is not a program we designed. It grew out of a conversation after Mass, when a grandmother asked if her grandson could complete his hours with us. She said, “He needs to put his hands in the earth. It will remind him who he is.” She was right. The soil has a memory, and it is generous with it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between food security and food sovereignty?

Food security focuses on whether people have enough food, regardless of where it comes from. Food sovereignty asks who controls the food system. A food bank can provide food security. A community garden, when it is part of a larger movement for land justice and policy change, builds food sovereignty. It shifts power from corporations and government programs back to the people who grow and eat the food.

How does a community garden address systemic issues like redlining?

Redlining and disinvestment created the conditions where our neighborhoods lack grocery stores and fresh food. A garden alone cannot undo decades of structural racism. But when a garden is paired with organizing for land-use reform, community land trusts, and advocacy for public investment, it becomes a tool for reclaiming space and demanding that the city serve all its residents equitably. The garden is the visible proof that the community can steward land productively, which strengthens the moral case for policy change.

What if our parish doesn’t have land for a garden?

Start with what you have. A few raised beds on the rectory lawn. A container garden in the parking lot. Partner with a school or a senior center that has underused space. The garden is a means, not an end. The end is building relationships and political will around food sovereignty. Even a small garden can be a platform for education, seed saving, and organizing. And if you don’t have land, ask why. That question alone can start a conversation about land use in your neighborhood that may lead to surprising alliances and opportunities.

How does the liturgical calendar shape the garden’s work?

We plant and harvest in rhythm with the Church year. Lent is a time of preparation and soil amendment. Easter celebrates new life, and we often plant our first seeds around that time. Ordinary Time is the long, steady work of tending and weeding. The Feast of St. Isidore the Farmer in May is a natural time for a garden blessing. And the harvest festivals of autumn coincide with the feasts of the Archangels and All Saints, when we remember that we are part of a communion that stretches across time. This rhythm roots our work in something deeper than a growing season; it roots it in a story of redemption.

What Comes Next: A Call to Reimagine Parish Land

I look at the empty lots around our parish, and I see not blight, but potential. I see a network of gardens, each one a small act of reparation for the land that was taken. I see a parish that is not just a place of worship, but a hub of food production, seed saving, and land-use advocacy. This is not a utopian dream. It is the practical, necessary work of building a community that can survive and thrive in the face of economic pressure and climate uncertainty.

If you are reading this and you belong to a parish or a community group, I invite you to walk your neighborhood and look at the land with new eyes. Where is the soil? Who controls it? What could it become? The answers to those questions are the beginning of a garden, and a garden is the beginning of a more just world. Not because of the vegetables, but because of the sovereignty they represent.

Father Tomás Guerrero is the pastor of Our Lady of Solitude Parish in East Los Angeles. He writes at the intersection of faith, land justice, and community organizing.

By Father Tomás Guerrero

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that settles into a neighborhood when the outsiders arrive. It’s not the exhaustion of hard work—our people know hard work. It’s the exhaustion of being studied, surveyed, and strategized over by organizations that didn’t grow from our soil. The term for this is parachute philanthropy: well-funded nonprofits and foundations that drop into a community, implement a program designed in a distant boardroom, and then leave when the grant cycle ends or the headlines shift. In East Los Angeles, we’ve seen this pattern repeat for decades. It’s a cycle that treats our barrios as laboratories, not as living, breathing neighborhoods with their own memory, leadership, and capacity for self-determination.

This isn’t a complaint against all outside help. The Church herself is universal, and we’ve been blessed by genuine partners who come to walk with us, not to fix us. The problem is a specific model: the short-term, metrics-driven project that prioritizes the funder’s logic over the community’s wisdom. It’s a model that often leaves behind more damage than good—fractured trust, abandoned initiatives, and a deep cynicism about whether anyone outside these streets actually believes in the people who live here.

The Liturgical Shape of a Neighborhood’s Life

To understand why parachuting fails, you first have to understand how a community like ours holds time. Our calendar isn’t the fiscal year. It’s the liturgical year, punctuated by Las Posadas in December, Viacrucis through the streets during Lent, and the explosion of Día de los Muertos altars in November. These aren’t just religious observances; they’re the scaffolding of our collective memory. They’re when we tell our stories, name our dead, and recommit to the living. Any effort that ignores this rhythm is already out of step.

I remember a well-intentioned health nonprofit that scheduled a major community forum on the Wednesday of Holy Week. They had a grant deadline. They had a logic model. What they didn’t have was anyone in the room who knew that on that night, our parish would be packed for the Tenebrae service, sitting in the dark as we listened to the Lamentations of Jeremiah. The forum was empty. The organizers were bewildered. The neighborhood, once again, felt unseen.

What Parachute Philanthropy Looks Like on the Ground

I’ve seen the pattern so often I can mark its seasons. First comes the needs assessment, conducted by a young researcher with a clipboard who asks questions our elders have answered a dozen times before. Then the pilot program, launched with fanfare and branded materials, often duplicating an effort already running quietly out of a church basement or a neighbor’s garage. Then the evaluation, where success is measured in outputs that fit a spreadsheet, not in the slow, stubborn work of building trust. Finally, the exit, when the grant ends and the staff move on to the next “underserved” zip code.

What’s left behind? Broken relationships. A mural that will fade because no one budgeted for its upkeep. A youth program that had just begun to earn the confidence of the teenagers on the block. And a deeper scar: the sense that we were only valuable as long as we were a problem to be solved.

The Logic of Extraction Disguised as Service

At its core, parachute philanthropy is extractive. It extracts stories, data, and legitimacy from a community to satisfy the requirements of a foundation or a government grant. The nonprofit’s survival depends not on the flourishing of the neighborhood, but on the renewal of funding. This creates a perverse incentive: the community must remain a “problem” to justify the organization’s existence. Real transformation—the kind that makes outside intervention unnecessary—becomes a threat to the business model.

In East Los Angeles, we’ve lived this. We’ve been mapped, surveyed, and focus-grouped until our stories feel like commodities. Our cultural memory—the very thing that makes us resilient—gets packaged into grant proposals. Our abuelitas’ recipes, our muralists’ iconography, our mariachi masses become “assets-based community development” bullet points. And then the funding dries up, and the outsiders leave, and we’re left to stitch our community back together.

The Alternative: Rooted, Reciprocal Partnership

There’s another way. I’ve seen it in the East LA Community Corporation, which grew from the struggles of our own families and has stayed for decades, building affordable housing and teaching financial literacy with the patience of a people who know they’re not going anywhere. I’ve seen it in Homeboy Industries, born from the grief and grit of Dolores Mission parish, offering healing and jobs to former gang members not as a program but as a family. These organizations aren’t parachutes; they’re trees, planted by streams of living water, rooted in the soil of our shared suffering and hope.

The difference isn’t just about longevity. It’s about accountability. A rooted organization is accountable to the people it serves because its leaders live among them, worship with them, and bury their dead with them. When a program fails, they can’t simply move to another city. They must face the neighbors at the panadería the next morning. That accountability breeds humility, and humility breeds wisdom.

Cultural Memory as the Antidote to Extraction

Our parish, Enomine Patris, sits at the intersection of faith and cultural memory. We’re named for the Father, but we’re also custodians of the stories of this place—the Chicano Moratorium, the displacement of families to build freeways, the Zoot Suit Riots, the sanctuary movement. These aren’t just history lessons. They’re living memories that shape how our people understand power, trust, and betrayal. Any organization that wants to work here must first learn to listen to these stories, not as data points but as sacred texts.

When a nonprofit parachutes in, it often treats local history as a liability—something to overcome with “best practices” imported from elsewhere. But our memory isn’t a liability. It’s a moral compass. It tells us which promises have been broken before, which leaders have stood with us, and which strategies actually work because they honor who we are. To ignore this memory is to guarantee failure.

The Liturgical Frame: Advent, Lent, and Ordinary Time

I’ve found that the church calendar offers a better framework for community work than any grant cycle. Advent teaches us to wait in hopeful darkness, to resist the tyranny of quick fixes. Lent calls us to repentance—to examine how we, even as a community, have been complicit in our own marginalization. Ordinary Time is the long, green season of growth, where the real work happens in the quiet, unglamorous day-to-day. Any organization that can’t live within this rhythm won’t last here.

Consider the Via Crucis, the Way of the Cross, which we walk through the streets of Boyle Heights every Good Friday. At each station, we stop at a site of pain: a corner where a young person was killed, a lot where a family was evicted, a school where children are hungry. We don’t do this to wallow in suffering. We do it to name the truth, to connect our story to Christ’s story, and to recommit ourselves to the work of resurrection. A parachuting nonprofit would see this as a “community engagement opportunity.” We see it as prayer.

What We Ask of Those Who Come

If you’re an organization considering working in East Los Angeles, I offer you these questions, not as a gatekeeper but as a pastor who’s seen too much damage done by good intentions:

• Who invited you? If the answer is a funder or a distant board, pause. Come only if the invitation comes from the people who live here, and even then, come slowly.
• How long will you stay? If the answer is tied to a grant cycle, reconsider. Commit to a presence measured in generations, not fiscal years.
• What will you leave behind? If the answer is a report, a toolkit, or a “capacity-building” workshop, know that we have drawers full of these. Leave behind relationships, resources, and a piece of your own heart.
• Are you willing to be changed? If you come only to change us, you’ll fail. The work of community is mutual transformation. Are you open to having your own assumptions, your own theology, your own sense of what’s possible, broken open by the people you seek to serve?

The Prophetic Call to Nonprofits

To the foundations and nonprofits that fund this parachute model: you’re not innocent. Your obsession with “innovation,” “scalability,” and “metrics” has created a nonprofit industrial complex that often harms the very communities it claims to serve. You demand that organizations show “impact” in 12-month reports, forcing them to chase quick wins instead of deep change. You reward charismatic founders with no local ties while ignoring the quiet leaders who’ve been holding their blocks together for decades. You talk about “equity” while perpetuating a system that extracts wealth and wisdom from poor neighborhoods and concentrates it in your endowed institutions.

This isn’t a call to abandon East Los Angeles. It’s a call to conversion. Come, but come in humility. Come to learn before you teach. Come to build relationships before you build programs. Come to stay, or don’t come at all.

Building a Community-Based Alternative

At Enomine Patris, we’re working to build something different. Our Community Memory Project trains young people from the neighborhood to collect oral histories, not for a grant report, but for our own archives—so that our stories remain ours. Our Feast Day Solidarity Markets create economic space for local vendors and artisans, keeping wealth circulating within our community. Our Neighborhood Leadership Circles meet not to be trained by outside experts, but to discern together what the Spirit is already doing in our streets and how we can join that work.

These aren’t programs. They’re practices, rooted in our faith and our place. They won’t show dramatic “outcomes” in a quarterly report. But they’re building the kind of durable, self-determining community that no parachuting nonprofit can ever create—and no departing nonprofit can destroy.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is parachute philanthropy?

Parachute philanthropy refers to the practice of outside organizations entering a community with short-term projects, often driven by external funding cycles, without building lasting relationships or local capacity. These groups typically leave once the grant ends, sometimes causing more harm than good by disrupting local networks and creating dependency.

How can I tell if a nonprofit is genuinely rooted in East Los Angeles?

Look for signs of long-term commitment: local leadership, a physical presence in the neighborhood, partnerships with churches and community groups that predate the organization, and a track record of staying through difficult times. Ask whether the organization’s decision-making includes community members, not just as advisors but as board members and staff. A rooted organization’s story is intertwined with the neighborhood’s story.

What can I do if my community has been harmed by a parachuting nonprofit?

Begin by documenting the impact—both the promises made and the reality left behind. Build or strengthen local networks that can hold outside groups accountable. Consider creating a community benefits agreement or a set of principles for outside organizations that want to work in your neighborhood. Most importantly, invest in your own community’s memory and leadership, so that you’re not dependent on outsiders to define your needs or your future.

How does the church calendar relate to community organizing?

The liturgical year offers a rhythm of reflection, lament, celebration, and ordinary work that mirrors the cycles of healthy community life. Advent teaches patient waiting and preparation. Lent calls for honest self-examination and repentance for communal sins. Easter proclaims that death doesn’t have the final word. Ordinary Time reminds us that most of the work is slow, daily, and unglamorous. Organizing that follows this rhythm is more likely to be sustainable and deeply rooted than organizing that follows a grant cycle.

A Final Word

I write this not in anger, though there’s anger in me. I write this in love—love for this neighborhood, for its saints and sinners, for its alleys and gardens, for its stubborn hope. We’re not a problem to be solved. We’re a people to be loved. And love, as the Apostle Paul reminds us, is patient and kind; it doesn’t insist on its own way; it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for programs, they’ll cease; as for grants, they’ll run out; as for metrics, they’ll fade away. But faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Come, then, in love. Or stay home and pray for us. Either way, we’ll be here, doing the work, as we have for generations.