San Antonio, TX, USA Looking to 2015
By Susan Ives
San Antonio is a city of 1.38 million -- the nation's 7th largest city and 25th largest metropolitan area (2.2 million in the SA-New Braunfels corridor.) We are 63% Hispanic (compared to 38% in Texas as a whole) and 19.2% of us live below the poverty level. We consider ourselves "the heart of Texas," although the airport's welcome sign says "welcome to military city USA (all of the Air Force basic training is conducted at Lackland AFB and the Army's medical personnel all train at Ft. Sam Houston.) Politically, we (and Austin) are more liberal than the rest of Texas.
Although San Antonio has been engaged with the Charter for Compassion since its release (we were one of the 75 cities hosting signings that day) it wasn't until January 2013 that the peaceCENTER acknowledged that we were the people we had been waiting for to initiate a city campaign and became the Charter catalysts. We decided to make the process a slow one, taking the first year (or two) to deepen our own understanding of compassion, develop an infrastructure and invite partners into the process.
Deepening understanding started with our core team reading and discussing Karen Armstrong'"Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life" during the preceding 3 months, then facilitating study groups. We've had five so far -- the largest was 40 paying participants and another is scheduled to begin in the new year. It has also meant listening to the community, both here and in the global sense. We've spent a lot of time developing language that was both clear, yet invitational and openended, including the relationship between compassion and the peaceCENTER, which can be confusing (compassion is one of many paths to peace, and it is the one we are focusing on right now.) This is, of course, continually evolving.
Developing infrastructure was made easier in that the peaceCENTER has been around for almost 20 years and many structures and relationships were in place. We developed a Web site & blog, set up a new mailing list (1000+ members now) and made everything separate so that it could eventually be severed from us and become an independent organization, if that's what it's meant to be.
Inviting partners has grown from our Pilgrimage of Compassion. We ask groups to tweak an existing event or create a new one that expresses their view of compassion, and invite us to participate. We bring a 6'x3' vinyl banner of the Charter -- everyone is invited to sign it -- and take about 5 minutes for a group reading of the charter and a very short explanation of what it would mean for San Antonio to be recognized as a compassionate city. We also help publicize the event, collect names for our mailing list and hand out a 2page flyer. We anticipated, at most, one event a month. We've had 23 so far, and six already on tap for early next year. At least 3,000 people have attended at least one pilgrimage stop this year. One of the attached flyers is a photo montage of the events through the end of October and the other is a sample of the flyer we hand out at these events. Our only agenda is to learn what THEY think -- which startles and delights everyone. We are mutually supporting. At the Dorothy Day birthday celebration at the Catholic Worker house the director noted that she didn't have a clue who half of the 200+ people were -- and we didn't know the other half. We haven't overstretched our small core team of volunteer workers (for most of these events we just show up) yet reap benefits of co-hosting an event. We get full buy-in from the hosts, who become stakeholders/partners in compassion. We expand our concept of what compassion can be by calling forth other voices. It also keeps Compassionate San Antonio from becoming overly identified with a particular cause/issue, as the events are "branded" by the primary host. It's all good.
Future plans: We've made several informal connections with City Council and will do that more in 2014, with the goal of having them endorse the charter by 2015. We have a day-long compassion summit scheduled for March; later that month, Oblate School of Theology is hosting their annual retreat (about 800 attend from all over the country.) The main speaker is to be Episcopal priest Michael Battle, a disciple of Archbishop Tutu, and the theme will be Ubuntu/compassion.
Our main tip: Without exception accentuate the positive and don't get caught up in a spiral of despair about ways we are NOT compassionate.
