PEOPLE POWER
For nearly 40 years now, Thee Metropolitan Organization has been pushing, collaborating and negotiating to improve the lives of Houstonians.
THERE’S a story that sounds almost apocryphal, except it isn’t, about how the Network of Texas IAF Organizations, which focuses on community-leadership development, came to anchor itself in the consciousness of elected officials across the state.
In a mid-1970s meeting with San Antonio officials to discuss persistent and deadly flooding that plagued some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, the story goes, leaders of the fledgling San Antonio-based Communities Organized for Public Service learned that the problem was wellknown to those in power. But the drainage needs weren’t addressed because “nobody had complained,” Andy Sarabia, a COPS founder, told the San Antonio Express-News in 2009.
The “complaining” hasn’t ebbed since, and the seed of successful community organizing planted by the Industrial Areas Foundation via COPS 40 years ago would spread statewide to several Texas cities, including Houston. Countless battles later, organizations affiliated with the Texas network have a seat at the tables of power in Austin, Amarillo, El Paso, Dallas, the Rio Grande Valley, San Angelo and San Antonio. Locally, the network affiliate is known as The Metropolitan Organization, or TMO. Primarily church-based, as the IAF organizations are in other cities, TMO is made up of 27 congregations largely located in east and southeast-side neighborhoods.
As the network of organizations marks its 40year anniversary, we turned to TMO leaders for insights about the group’s work here in Houston, its impact and vision for the future. Outlook editor Veronica Flores-Paniagua talked with the Rev. Robert McGee and Ana Cummings, who were among TMO’s founders. These are excerpts from their conversation.
Q: What sparked the formation of Network of Texas IAF Organizations and The Metropolitan Organization?
Cummings: TMO was formed around 1980. COPS had been formed a couple of years before that. They had a lot of success initiating changes in their neighborhoods, especially on infrastructure and flooding. They began to talk to public
officials about the needs in their neighborhoods. In Houston, there was a lot of interest in giving a voice to people in our community.
Q: What were the conditions in Houston that needed attention?
McGee: They’re kind of the same as they are now. One had to do with flooding. Another had to do with policing and public safety. There was also health care. These are issues that will always need attention.
Q: Did you feel that city leaders were not giving your communities attention or priority ?
McGee: They were not. There was a ditch along what now is MLK Drive. It ran from around Van Fleet to Selinsky. It would flood regularly. Until finally one day, someone died. What we did was get the city to install drainage culverts and people could have access to sidewalks there.
There was a proliferation of crime, too. There were crack houses that were being set up in our community. We wanted to address that.
Q: In Houston, how did city leaders receive TMO?
Cummings: They tried to divide and conquer. They tried to say TMO was a radical organization. They would say, ‘We don’t want to bring that kind of organization into Houston.’ There was a lot of undercutting. As I recall, several religious leaders went to City Hall and sat outside the mayor’s office. They wouldn’t receive the leaders as a group. They said they could come in one by one. But the religious leaders refused to go in until the mayor met with them as a group.
Q: Many grassroots groups in Houston organize communities into action. How is The Metropolitan Organization different or unique?
McGee: What was different about TMO from the start — it was multiethnic and it was ecumenical. The concerns that were being expressed were not only coming from the African-American community or the Latino community. TMO began to address things with a unified voice. When (city leaders) began to see we were working together, along with our communities and churches, they began to listen to what we had to say and began to work with us to address these issues. Cummings: The way TMO works is different, too. Education of the leaders is part of the work that we do. We equip leaders to work with others to research together issues that are affecting their lives and then teach them to work with public officials to address those issues. Those leadership skills that are developed can be used