Pastor Dianne Garcia with Goliad Road Community of Promise, Iglesia Cristiana Roca de Refugio, and Nuevos Vecinos brought briefing on current and local efforts afoot in terms of immigration. She’s been working with a community collaborative of ~50 other individuals and organizations with resourcing and support.
Tom Brymer, with 40+ years in local TX government, will be bringing our briefing tomorrow @TheIntersection! He has served in assistant and city manager roles in Richardson, Bryan, Gilmer, Lockhart, College Station, Westlake, and Olathe, KS. Tom’s earliest observations and long-term experience led him to author the book, Fighting for Democracy*, in response to his observed civic illiteracy among citizens, public servants, and elected officials with education being key.
Virginia Mata, Director of Social Justice with the SA Catholic Archdiocese, brought our briefing from her recent PhD research on community organizing, action, and engagement within Our City!
SA is becoming an official Strong Cities Network member with ~260 other global cities! Join in every Thursday in January for a refresher and deeper dive into Community Organizing and Engagement.
San Antonio has a long history of grassroots community organizing. In most recent years, via this DHS’ Faith Initiative and other departments, COSA has been intentionally utilizing community organizing, collaborative partnerships, and compassion skills’ methods on a citywide scale. Our city isn’t alone in this strategic method of large-scale civic engagement. See attached, and check out this recorded webinar from Philadelphia via the Strong Cities Network...
Dwayne Robinson, MLK Commission Chair, will be bringing his I-have-a-Dream for San Antonio as a growing, it-takes-all-of-us compassionate community into 2025 and beyond!
Peter Onofre, an active participant in EcoSA (Environmental Collaborative of SA), briefs in this installment of @TheIntersection. Peter shares his experience within a congregation, working in collaboration with others, and receiving a micro-grant from the City of San Antonio – and the large impact all that is having on the ground and in the community!
The Community Co-Lead of the Environmental Collaborative of SA, Judith Temple, along with Dominic from Gardopia, brought our briefing.
CEO of Culturingua, Nadia Mavrakis, updates about refugees becoming residents and homeowners.
10! Years of Interfaith Welcome Coalition w/special guest, Mayor Nirenberg
Wednesday, November 6, 2024. What happens then? Congregations and other local organizations can help by providing space for their members and the wider community to share and process. Days-of-prayer; fellowship; drop-in counseling; and shared service are some of the ways to support community members as they deal with big feelings.
This week we hear about the collaboration of nonprofit, government, community efforts, etc. from Katie Wilson, Executive Director of Close to Home (formerly SARAH).
Kathy Lacy, COSA Homelessness Services, along with Pastor Vincent Robinson, Harper’s Chapel, brief this week in terms of City street outreach as well as from within a congregational setting (Harper’s Chapel). This is part 2 of our 3-part mini-series on home/houselessness in San Antonio, within our summer series, Be The Neighbor.
By Assistant Director of the Department of Human Services, Patrick Steck
Housing (and other options) coming out of congregational settings & facilities – Ramiro Gonzales and Good Acres
This San Antonio film premiered last month at the Carver and was produced by the H.E.B. Foundation – produced by San Antonians for San Antonians and with San Antonians in mind.
After the school shooting in Uvalde, collaborative efforts began in 2 days – the community of faith + government entities + nonprofits + community groups + social workers, etc. working to change the story of Our City – together. Pastor Rob Mueller, Divine Redeemer Presbyterian and COPS/Metro, will be bringing the latest update tomorrow.
SA’s Public Health Administrator, Erica Haller-Stevenson, will be bringing our briefing about the strategy she collaboratively led forward in 2023 and has been in the implementation process.
An update by Bill Neely, from SACRD, the San Antonio Community Resource Directory.
The Collaboration-in-SA summer series continues to get the most current updates on community collaborative efforts – how they have grown, what new growth is happening, how to get involved and be connected, etc. Doug Beach, Executive Director of NAMI San Antonio briefs on NAMI San Antonio, Pathways To Hope, Bridges to Care, and more.
Register for Pathways to Hope, August 23-24, 2024, Free
Read about NAMI San Antonio
See a map of all the Bridges to Care wellness champions in faith communities.
Volunteer Organizations Active in Disasters (aka. VOAD) with the briefing being presented by the lead of that collaborative effort, Keith Berger with the Red Cross.
Hurricanes. Flooding. Snowing. Mass shootings. San Antonio has prepared and planned coordination for these large-scale happenings that directly impact humans.
Members of the City’s Emergency Management will be with us tomorrow to brief us on what kicks into place when emergencies happen, how we can know more, and how we can help.
Please meet Xavier Vara, Nutrition Education Coordinator at the SA Food Bank. Xavier is bringing our briefing in the morning and sharing the nutrition education that they do – and how there are opportunities for all of us in our congregations and our organizations. What a great way to start our summers – HEALTHY!
San Antonio’s Fullbright Scholar, Vladimer Narsia, briefs about political changes in Georgia regarding “foreign agents” and how this has affected his work in San Antonio. Vladimer’s term of service just ended in May, but this bill prevents him from returning to his wife and child in Georgia. We need to be hearing stories and first-hand life experiences like these to keep us awake to global and local realities and grounded in empathic compassion.
MAJOR Compassion Campaign across SA and USA! Come June, you’re gonna see it everywhere!! Be in the know and come to the briefing given by Eric Castillo, Vice Chancellor at Alamo Colleges District and part of the CompassionateUSA Team.
Rev. Julie Brenton Rowe, a San Antonian who serves as a hospital chaplain, briefs based on her just-released book, “Why Peace and Prayers are Not Enough: A Primer on Justice and Peace in Palestine and Israel.” She served with the Lutheran Bishop in Jerusalem for 4 years and her book is based on her experiences, learnings, and reflections from that time of service.
Paul Furukawa on Breaking the Mental Health Stigma
Continuing our recognition of Earth Day - Thomas Marchetti briefs with data from his Master’s thesis regarding the faith community's response to the Cry of The Earth and Adopting Sustainable Lifestyles.
San Antonian, Rev. Michael Harrington brought our briefing.. Michael was the co-coordinator of the 1994 SA Gang Peace Summit 30 years ago this month and has continued with youth engagement models across the U.S. He’s now circling back to bring-it home as the “Youth Liberation Movement!”
Scott Ackerson, social worker and former VP at Haven for Hope, brought our briefing from the Social Impact Studio at WestEast Designs architectural firm here in SATX. What? A social worker at an architectural firm??! Come, bring others, and find out about affordable housing that creates space for people to heal.
Becca Brune with the H.E. Butt (Family) Foundation grought our briefing about their Congregational Collective. In our mutual collaborative work, it’s important to know significant efforts at work to best connect and align all our efforts toward a more compassionate San Antonio.
What would you do as a lead in your community if you had $20,000? (Total $-amount of grants to be given = $1 million!)
Kate Jaceldo, City’s Office of Sustainability, brought our briefing this week.
From the City’s Department of Human Services, Laura Serrano, Chief of Social Demography, discusses the 2024 Status of Poverty Report. (pdf) (interactive dashboard)
NAMI Bridges to Care’s, Nuria Diallo, and Emma Alexander, brief this morning about what has grown out of a Community Collaborative and continues to grow out of community collaboration! The work and its impact have come a long way in these last years – and there’s a strong vision for the future!
Bill Neely, SACRD Executive DIrector, reviews the upcoming Housing Stabitity Portal.
Elementary to university teachers have been meeting globally to help especially children during these challenging times. From those virtual hearts of commitment has grown a Children’s Voices Project.
Please hear all about it from Sr. Martha Ann Kirk, a rep of this global teachers collaborative!
We are putting into action what we’ve been learning together about Healing from within different faith, spiritual, and religious traditions in SATX. Doug Beach brought this story to us earlier, then wrote an op-ed about mental health and police response in San Antonio
Jan Puckett brough out briefing:
Jan is a retired anesthesiologist and Buddhist practitioner. She attended Texas A&M University, as one of the first 2 women pre-med students to graduate from A&M. She received her medical and anesthesiology training at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, then moved to San Antonio in 1978 to practice anesthesiology for 34 years before retiring in 2012. Jan has been a practicing Buddhist since 1984, and is a member of Nalandabodhi, an international Tibetan Buddhist community founded by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche.
An extraordinary conversation with DreamWeek’s creator, Sho Nakpodia, and coordinators of at least 4 intentional interfaith DreamWeek events:
Dr. Danuta Wojnar and Sr. Martha Ann Kirk, from the University of the Incarnate Word, will bring our briefing in our current series on Healing from the many faith traditions in SATX.
Marcia Weser brought our briefing in part 4 of our series about healing from among the spiritual, faith, and religious traditions across Our City. Marcia comes highly recommended to us by Rabbi Emeritus and San Antonio Peace Laureate, Samuel Stahl.
Shahram Ebadfardzadeh (yep, our man-in-white!) is bringing our briefing as we continue our series on Healing from the practices and perspectives of the many faith, religious, and spiritual traditions across Our City.
San Antonio Peace Laureate, Dr. Rajam Ramamurthy, is briefing us tomorrow in part 3 of our series about healing from among the spiritual, faith, and religious traditions in Our City. Rajam is also professor emeritus at UT Health in pediatrics and neonatology.
Native San Antonian and Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan elder, Linda Ximenes, continues our healing series from across SA’s many faith traditions, religions, and spirituality that we started last week. You might remember her from within the CompassionateUSA video on Gratitude and Interdependence at: compassionateusa.org/be-grateful/
@TheIntersection last week we had a conversation about having conversations about difficult community concerns and issues. That leads us naturally into the importance of healing and compassion in our community, our world, and in our many cultures.
San Antonian, Dr. Poonam Sharma, will be bringing our briefing from a psychological perspective on what’s going on inside and outside of us during our current times. Future @TheIntersections will be brought to us from various faith traditions, spiritualities and religions within Our City. For example, what can we learn about healing and compassion from the original people who lived and live on this land? How can we enrich our community relations by learning about others’ healing traditions and compassion practices? More to follow, and you can pre-view Dr. Sharma on the ~7 minute CompassionateUSA video, Be Self-Aware, found at www.CompassionateUSA.org .
Since October 7, more than 3,257 children have been reported killed, including at least 3,195 in Gaza, 33 in the West Bank, and 29 in Israel, according to the Ministries of Health in Gaza and Israel respectively. The number of children reported killed in just three weeks in Gaza is more than the number killed in armed conflict globally—across more than 20 countries—over the course of a whole year, for the last three years. Save the Children, October 29, 2023
Tomorrow’s briefing is a facilitated conversation (by me) about having compassionate conversations during these complex times. We will not specifically be talking about the above context, but we will be conversing about some how’s in having the conversations that are needed to remain community and to heal community.
Voluntary weapons exchange, October’s multi-faith symposium on violence, memorials to lives lost, etc. is our briefing brought to us by Rev. Rob Mueller from Divine Redeemer Presbyterian.
Metro Health’s Angela Warren on Unlocked Initiative & 13th Amendment
The Rev. Dr. Que English keynoted in-person this past August at Pathways to Hope. She serves as the Director of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in D.C. Dr. Que joinmed us to reflect back to us what she sees happening in Our City as well as inform and invite us into stepping up and into even more!
An update of the Surgeon General’s Advisory on loneliness & social connections, and how-We-can-help, will be brought to us straight from D.C. Here’s the Advisory that was issued in May: Here
HUBS in Our City hold SO much potential! We’ve had briefings on these before, but the conversation continues and there are developments afoot. Both Bryan Norris (Fire Department) and Doug Melnick (Sustainability) will be bringing our briefing to continue the conversation about the highly needed hubs for emergencies and for daily & long-term sustainability within all our communities.
Our “San Antonio experience” was a part of the research that went into this amazing Action Guide!* San Antonians came together for a community conversation and listening session last April with researchers and Action Guide creators. The Action Guide syncs with the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on social connectedness and was created in partnership with the Foundation for Social Connection, Healthy Places by Design, the Einhorn Collaborative, and The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
Abigail Barth, with the Foundation for Social Connection, provided our briefing on the *Action Guide for Building Socially Connected Communities.
The City’s Workforce Development (Amy Contreras) and NAMI Bridges to Care (Doug Beach) and SACRD.org (Bill Neely) will be conversationally briefing us. It’s time to start talking about the “intersections” @TheIntersection!
Uvalde Community and Compassion with Rev. Mike Marsh
Vladimer Narsia is a visiting Fulbright Scholar* from Tblisi, Georgia, to discuss interreligious dialog, peace & conflict studies, and world religions.
Resiliency Hubs. Frankly, isn’t this what all our organizations and congregations are created and meant to be? What if we boost our daily places and re-create them to be even more resilient and more compassionate? Maria Villagomez, Assistant City Manager, and Deputy Chief Bryan Norris, SAFD Emergency Management Coordinator bring the briefing today.
Review of the proposed city budget for 2024 by Deputy City Manager Maria Villagomez.
Melissa Cabello Havrda, District 6 Councilperson, and chair of the San Antonio City Council’s Public Safety Committee, meets us @TheIntersection to hear and discuss the recommendations for improvements to the City’s public response to mental health crisis needs and how police are used in that capacity. This is a continuation of the @TheIntersection topic from August 3.
Those impacted by mental illness need better public safety. Remember the recent shooting of Melissa Perez in Our City? We talked about it at an earlier @TheIntersection and people-with-plans have come together to help SA move forward stronger and more compassionately. Doug Beach from NAMI San Antonio and Ernie Stevens from The Council of State Governments present a briefing about how we can improve public safety responses to mental health crises.
Learn about a Weapons Exchange Program from Councilman John Courage.
Compassion for Others is our mutual work between faith, community, and civic leaders throughout the lifespan @TheIntersection, since the beginning of the pandemic and until this day.
San Antonio’s own, Linda Ximenes, led our briefing within the 6-part video series of CompassionateUSA.
Self-Compassion is our briefing. Self-Compassion is a major key to our mental wellness. Our weekly briefings and conversations from within the CompassionateUSA materials are critical to our personal and community well-being.
Today’s briefing @TheIntersection is important. We continue our look into CompassionateUSA. www.CompassionateUSA.org
30 murders annually are linked to road rage. (American Psychological Association)
Road rage has increased by over 500% over the last 10 years!!! (CNN)
Today’s briefing @TheIntersection is important. We continue our look into CompassionateUSA. www.CompassionateUSA.org
Think about gun violence or food insecurity. Now think about them as systems. Many people are working very hard to change those trajectories and yet, there is still an increase in both. We’re using the same systems to help that somehow are not bringing a decrease. Our times require a new-yet-ancient way of thinking to change and transform who we are as humans together.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again (or just more of it) and expecting different results.”Misattributed to Einstein in the comprehensive reference The Ultimate Quotable Einstein from Princeton University Press
Food insecurity is a perfect in-tandem to last week’s briefing on the Farm Bill in meeting the needs of the most vulnerable in Our City!
Eric Cooper, President and CEO of SA Food Bank, brought our briefing. Did you know that for every meal the Food Bank provides, SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) provides nine? What does that equate to in San Antonio??!
Robert Mueller and Bryan Miller discuss their work on gun violence reform in a post-Uvalde world.
Heeding God's Call to End Gun Violence (Heeding) is a grassroots and interfaith-based organization headquartered in Philadelphia and active throughout Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Heeding is a 501c3 organization under IRS regulations, so is prohibited from partisan activity.
We firmly believe that without the deep involvement of the American and Pennsylvania faith communities, little if anything will happen to make our streets, neighborhoods, towns, and cities safer from gun violence. So, we have created programs and activities expressly designed to appeal to people and institutions of faith. We seek to energize communities of all faiths into activism by stressing positive messaging and inspiring local activities, intended to mobilize and organize.
Heeding has developed a stepped series of activities made to attract people of faith to and then along a spectrum of advocacy, with places all along the spectrum for the faithful. We often begin with a Memorial to the Lost, a colorful and portable tee-shirt memorial that honors those taken by gun violence and their families and inspires viewers. The presence of a Memorial to the Lost opens space for conversation in congregations of all faiths and removes stigma. We then move on to other activities, such as our local Gun Violence Awareness Days, that pull several local faith communities together to address gun violence, including legislative letter-writing campaigns and direct personal lobbying, public witnesses at rogue or irresponsible gun shops, and much more. Heeding's primary policy concern is seeking to stop the movement of illegal handguns from gun stores to the street and criminal market. These are the handguns used to wound, maim and kill.
Chaplain Kerry Haynes brought our briefing on Moral Trauma. Please forward this invitation onto your colleagues and networks as we all need to know about this lesser-known form of trauma.
Mayor Nirenberg will be dropping in during our briefing on Compassionate USA, brought to us by its Design Team from the SA Peace Center, now with Alamo College District.
Artificial intelligence (AI). What is it? What does it mean in our current context? What might it mean at the intersections of faith, community, and civic collaborative efforts? Billy Cox, a tech expert with SACRD led the discussion.
Krista Del Gallo, the Legislative Director of the Texas Council on Family Violence brought our briefing this Thursday.
A community viewing and discussion of Ron Nirenberg's 2023 State of the City address from April 11, 2023.
See the original video on YouTube.
Parks & Rec’s Nicole McLeod will be bringing our briefing tomorrow on why every day needs to be Earth Day in Our City.
"The Earth is what we all have in common" - Wendell Barry
EcoSA Collaborative meets Mondays, noon - 1:30 pm at EcoCentro at SAC.
Deceleration News Events Calendar
Earth Day 2023 at Woodlawn Lake
UN Millenium Development Goals
NY Times Extreme Heat Will Change Us (paywall)
Scientific American - The Right Words are Crucial to Solving Climate Change
“Faith-based organizations own 8% of the habitable land surface, 5% of all commercial forests, 50% of the schools in the world and 64% of schools in sub-Saharan Africa, 10% of the world’s total financial institutions, and 14% of its community development corporations. There are 37 million churches in the world with 34,000 (Christian) denominations. The current number of mosques in the world is around 4,000,000. There are 20,000 synagogues and countless temples. Adapting these establishments to produce their own energy, reduce their carbon footprint, and extend these benefits to neighboring communities will be a massive demonstration of practicing what we prea
Madhu Sridhar and Alene Lyndee, with the non-partisan League of Women Voters, brought our briefing on their work and the non-partisan resources they have to offer to the community collaborative known as Voting!
Samuel Gomez with the American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions (AITSCM) shares about the San Antonio Fatherhood Campaign.
Read Sam's chapter "La Cultura Cura: Students and Fathers as Growth Facilitators for Each Other Through Pallabra", page 275 in Empowering Students as Change Agents in Psychology Courses (you do not need a Dropbox account to download).
Our briefing was brought to us by Mary Beth Fisk, Executive Director of the Ecumenical Center for Religion and Health. The South Texas Trauma Informed Care Consortium was established in 2018 and is made up of 12 sector workgroups of nonprofit organizations with a vision of creating a trauma-informed county, city, and community.
What does trauma informed care mean?
What does that mean in terms of our county, city, and community?
What does this mean for our congregations, organizations, neighborhoods, etc.?
How can we learn about trauma informed care and get more engaged?
Our briefing will come tomorrow from within the Housing Via Faith Community Collaborative. Other cities across the country are doing similar and strategic works of mission such as this. Think about your own locations of prayer and work before tomorrow morning. Their available and unused acreage? Their available and unused facilities?
Our briefing is brought to us by Becky Dinnin with SVPSA and Bill Neely with SACRD.org to talk about Catchafire. Come. I think we’ll be inspired into a whole new way of being San Antonians!
The newest (just 3 months old) community collaborative is about care for our mutual alma mater, our Nourishing Mother, the Earth. EcoSA is full-speed ahead in a strong formative process and moving with the urgent nature required in our current global context. Ann Helmke facilitates the briefing with insights from the co-laborers in attendance.
Yep, MILLIONS OF MEALS over the last 13 years! That’s FeedSA. https://www.feedsa.org/
200,000 students get free meals at school but will miss at least 10 meals this summer. That’s 2,000,000 meals. Join FeedSA to help us fight hunger in SA.
Our briefing is brought to us by Culturingua’s own Nader and Riga. If you’ve not met them before, well, just that will be worth your time but hearing about San Antonio’s leading edge across the U.S. will raise our time spent together to the tenth degree!
Yes, it’s that time of year when we tend to talk more about love. Valentine’s Day is right around the corner. And the Domestic Violence Prevention via Faith Community Collaborative is well-reminding us that love should not hurt in our homes – faith or family homes.
Come and hear why they’re doing what they’re doing – as well as registering right now for the community conversation next Tuesday, Valentine’s Day 2023. Chief McManus will be joining us and I’m certain he’d appreciate seeing you there. I know I will! So will all your colleagues in this community collaborative who are working hard to make this Valentine’s Day a day of true love for all of us to remember. All the details and registration here:
https://TakingActionInOurHomes.eventbrite.com
For all of us working towards peace in SA, I am so excited to hear about this Plan and its process! We’ll be hearing all about it from Metro Health’s, Erica Haller-Stevenson, Public Health Administrator, Violence Prevention Section. She’s making this Plan happen with the help of community.
Chief McManus and Kristie Alsagar are our uniquely paired San Antonians in part 4 of this 4-part MLK/DreamWeek series, What’s Our Story? Through conversational storytelling we’ve been discovering together our common humanity, common worth, and common daily work. Together.
Maria Villagomez and Beverly Watts Davis are our uniquely paired San Antonians in part 3 of this 4-part MLK/DreamWeek series, What’s Our Story? Through conversational storytelling we’ve been discovering together our common humanity, common worth, and common daily work. Together.
The Dreamweek 2023 "What's Our Story" series continues with Luu Do, Protective Security Advisor/San Antonio District, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure, Department of Homeland Security Agency, and Rev. Herman Price, Jr., Pastor of St. John Baptist Church, retired United States Air Force.
Each Thursday at this 4-week series @TheIntersection, two uniquely paired San Antonians will be sharing their individual stories in discovery to see if they have an intersection of their common humanity. How do individual lives contribute to our common identity? Is there more than what meets the eye of our perceptions about each other? Does that “more” mean something to our representation among us and beyond our city limits?
Sho Nakpodia has joined us again! Some of us will remember his powerful presence with us @TheIntersection this past November 3rd, https://sacrd.org/pages/attheintersection. We were so inspired that day that we’ve planned a 4-week series this entire January @TheIntersection – “What’s Our Story?”
Every Thursday, two perhaps-unlikely paired San Antonians will be sharing their individual stories in a discovery to see if they have an intersection within their common humanity. Sho is one in this week’s pairing. There is human importance in telling and hearing each other’s stories when it comes to identity and representation, when it comes to truth and reconciliation in Our City.
“What’s Our Story?” comes out of the efforts of two collaboratives in these post-pandemic times and formed out of @TheIntersection – the SA Story Community Collaborative at www.StoryPortalSATX.org and the Healing SA Community Collaborative at www.HealingSATX.org .
This was a rare opportunity during Judge Wolff’s last days of service. This is a reflective interview as well as some shared wisdom based on his long service and into our mutual futures.
San Antonio City Manager, Erik Walsh, shares the results from the 2022 Community Survey on City Services. Mel Woosley, Executive Director of Human Services, follows with a briefing on the City’s human services and compassionate care during 2022.
M-Pox with the City’s Public Health Administrator, Miguel Cervantes, and Dr. Ruth Berggren with UT Health’s Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics
Peter Onofre (New Life Christian Center’s Operations Administrator) and Luu Do (SA’s Protective Security Advisor for Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency/Homeland Security) provided our briefing through the telling of their combined story of meeting at last year’s Interfaith Symposium, assessing, and $150,000 of funding to make it so.
The City’s new Vaccine Equity Manager, Sandra Imery, will be bringing an important brief-briefing about where vaccines are headed at the turn of this year. And, a special guest who is visiting San Antonio from Australia (this week only!), Dr. Patricia Madigan, will be in conversation with us about how relationships and service among many faiths can become “security."
Our briefing is brought to us by Eric Estrada, E.D. of form communities, Inc., formerly known as the SA Clubhouse. Their model of healing is at one-and-the-same time ancient and innovative.
Mission Minutes – Activities in the various collaboratives were shared
A few examples:
The importance of telling & hearing stories when it comes to identity & representation, truth & reconciliation in Our City.
Stories: "listen without judgement and connect with our humanity"
This episode of @TheIntersection features a conversation with the chair of the MLK Commission, Dwayne Robinson. We talk about the work of the San Antonio MLK commission and DreamWeek San Antonio. The conversation focuses less on what's coming in DreamWeek in January and mostly on the dream to go deep into healing a community, following in the steps of MLK.
The briefing will come to us by the SA Healing in Community Collaborative. You can take a sneak-peak at their work here: www.healingsatx.org
The City of San Antonio Mayor, Ron Nirenberg, is bringing our briefing from his vantage point – what he sees as the top 10 efforts and initiatives that are game changers for Our City right now.
10. The Welcome Walk
9. Public Art funding
8. Upcoming remake of San Antonio International Airport
7. SA Forward
6. 2022 Affordable Housing Bond
5. The Climate Sustainability Fund
4. Resiliency Hubs
3. Migrant Resource Center
1b. The Ready To Work program
1a. The PEACE Initiative, Public Easy Access to Compassion Education
Executive Book Review
Mark Wittig: Jan 2023 is 9 years for EBR, next event is Oct 7 (326th event)
“we are executives of our own lives”
Learn from the presenter, learn from the group, meet life-long learners
Don’t have to read the book under discussion, just be there
Anna Downey: Oct 20, 5:30, featuring 3 outstanding women sharing their ‘forks in the road’
Collaboratives form to meet community needs through compassionate actions towards self, others, and within systems. Co-laborers in San(e) Society are from within Metro Health, SAPD, Department of Human Services’ Faith Based Initiative, Compassionate SA, Alamo Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, Pax Christi, Community of Churches for Social Action, Baptist Ministers Union – to name a few.
Did you know that 50% of all calls to police in San Antonio are domestic violence calls? That 1-in-3 women will experience domestic violence in Texas, potentially and probably in our congregations? Working together we can make a difference.
The SA Story Community Collaborative is one of our youngest collaboratives. It was formed earlier this year as research began to rise around our collective traumas (pandemic, shootings, etc.) and the significant impact stories have in our collective and community healing process. (Of course, many of us already know about this ancient wisdom.) This is some rich and valuable work for our entire community and Our City. You won't want to miss this! See attached informative handout and press release about StoryPortalSATX.org
Community collaboratives help fill the gaps in compassionate care and service along with the fact that many hands lighten the load towards effectiveness and efficiency.
The briefing is extraordinary as we will co-experience a taste of collaborative work. Just one year ago, Communities of Welcome came out of a discerned gap in service within the then-newly formed Afghan Refugee Response Collaborative (ARRC). We will be hearing about that formation and how far it has travelled in just 1 year - as well as explore where it might lead into our mutual future!
“Over 22,000 migrants arrived in San Antonio last month alone (July 2022), after being released from immigration custody (mostly from border patrol). Over 29,000 were sheltered at least one night in the City of San Antonio last month. From March 19, 2022 – August 10, 2022, we have received 91,446 arrivals and provided shelter to 92,148 migrants in San Antonio. I believe that as a compassionate community, we are doing our part.” -Tino Gallegos
Who can believe this??! And what about the refugees coming into SATX? Tino will be bringing us the latest on refugees as well as introducing us to his replacement as the City’s Immigration Liaison, Mayra Montero.
Our briefing this week will be about @TheIntersection itself! For newcomers to @TheIntersection, this will be an excellent time to get the fullest picture of the mutual work afoot. For regulars to @TheIntersection, be thinking about at least one solid example of something that has come out of @TheIntersection for you.