Fix It and They Will Come
How the renewal of a crumbling New Jersey church became a model for reinvestment in community life
By Laurie Mazur
Five years ago, the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Essex County, New Jersey, had serious problems. Chunks of plaster fell from the walls of its 126-year-old sanctuary. A raccoon had taken up residence in the box gutters that drained the roof, causing a bad leak. The rickety wooden ramp leading up to the front door was an accident (and a lawsuit) waiting to happen.
Worse, the congregation had dwindled to just thirty members, less than half of what it had been a decade earlier. Its part-time minister found himself preaching each Sunday morning to a small handful of congregants.
“We were discussing, should we go out of business?” says congregation member Mindy Fullilove, a professor of urban policy and health at the New School, about twenty miles away in New York City.
The church, she explains, entered “a complicated year of discernment” during which it partnered with others to embrace a new strategy for expanding the church’s role as a center of community life. With help from a nonprofit crowdfunding platform called ioby (the acronym stands for “in our backyards”), First UU repaired its buildings and opened its doors to the people of its struggling neighborhood.
Today, the church, minus its minister, is a hive of activity — sewing classes, labor organizing, potlucks, a local music festival. As neighbors gather again under the church’s (non-leaking) roof, they are spinning new webs of connection, strengthening the filaments of trust and fellowship that hold this community together.
First UU sits just off Main Street in Orange, New Jersey, a city of about 30,000 people near Newark. In many ways, Orange exemplifies the policies that have shaped America’s post-industrial cities, with a devastating impact on working-class communities.
Orange emerged as an industrial powerhouse after the Civil War; by the turn of the twentieth century, its thirty-four hat-making factories earned it the nickname “Hat City.” The city’s residents built Victorian mansions, parks, and libraries, while enclaves of Italian, Irish, and African American factory workers thrived and grew.
The fruits of prosperity in Orange were always distributed unevenly. Even in its glory days, the city was rigidly segregated by race, ethnicity, and class, with inferior schools and services in the poorer parts of town. Then, starting in the 1930s, redlining steered investment away from African American and immigrant neighborhoods, spreading blight and deepening the wealth gap. And in the 1960s, construction of an interstate highway through the center of town sped the exodus of white residents — and capital — to the suburbs.
Today, nearly 90 percent of Orange residents are black or Latinx, including a large population of Caribbean immigrants. More than two-thirds of the city’s households get by on less than $50,000 a year; one in four of its people live in poverty.
Mindy Fullilove grew up in Orange, the daughter of an African American labor and community organizer and a white legal secretary. Fullilove left at the age of sixteen and pursued a career as a psychiatrist and urbanist (The New York Times credited her with “put[ting] entire cities on the couch”). In books that include Root Shock and Urban Alchemy, Fullilove has explored the policies that disfigured cities like Orange, offering strategies to repair our frayed urban fabric.
Fullilove visited Orange in 2007 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of a successful campaign to desegregate the city’s schools, and for the first time fell in love with her hometown. While the challenges were evident, she was struck by the vitality of the city’s people and its built environment. So she moved back to the area and rejoined First UU, which she had attended as a child.
Much had changed in the thirty years that Fullilove had been away. Orange had lost some of its luster. Despite its segregation and pockets of poverty, the Orange of Fullilove’s youth had been full of thriving institutions — houses of worship, unions, settlement houses, community centers, a hospital — which nurtured a dense web of social connections, anchoring civic life. At the city’s sesquicentennial in 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower was moved to remark, “Your public services and neighborly spirit are an example to the nation.”
But one by one, the venerable institutions of Orange began closing their doors. Orange Memorial Hospital shut down in 2004; the YWCA of Essex and West Hudson declared bankruptcy in 2013. The First Presbyterian Church of Orange, founded 300 years ago, gave it up in 2010.
What does it mean for a community to lose its anchor institutions? You could say the loss signals a growing void at the heart of our society — and democracy. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, he marveled at how “Americans of all ages, all stations in life . . . are forever forming associations.” Those associations — “religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute” — form the connective tissue of a healthy democracy.
Two decades ago in his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam warned that the connections that held communities together are weakening. Americans are increasingly less likely to gather in churches, union halls, and, yes, bowling alleys. The reasons for the decline (including union-busting and longer work hours) are complex, but the cost is clear: Our stock of social capital — the networks of reciprocity and trust that turn “me” into “we” — is dangerously depleted.
Sadly, the trends Putnam identified have only worsened since then, though now, when the average American spends twenty-four hours a week online, we are more likely to be scrolling — or trolling — alone.
By all indicators, First UU — with its dwindling membership and crumbling buildings — was set to be the next anchor institution in Orange to go under. Congregants and board members struggled with the agonizing decision to close.
Then a visiting Unitarian minister named John Gilmore (also known as Om Prakash) got them thinking. He noted that those crumbling buildings — a sanctuary, parish hall, and parish house — were assets, not liabilities. He urged First UU to make its space available to the neighborhood for various uses, and take its place at the center of a revitalized community.
This approach is in keeping with “asset-based community development,” the idea of building on what works, rather than focusing on what’s broken. Even (or especially) in historically under-resourced neighborhoods, residents possess deep reserves of skill, talent, and human connection. The best solutions emerge where residents can readily put those assets to work.
“So what we did,” Fullilove relates, “was take the money we had for a minister and use it to hire a managing director of our buildings, and to create what we call The HUUB.” The name is not an acronym, but represents the hub of community activity HUUB aims to be, with the two “U”s of “Unitarian Universalism” at its core. According to the church’s website, the mission of The HUUB is “to turn the buildings and land we own, the Church’s most valuable assets, outward to be a welcoming resource for the people of Orange.”
Left: The church’s welcoming and safe new entrance. Center: Teaching and learning new skills with the Sewing Angels. Right: Decorating for a Syria Supper Club feast on Eid al-Fitr, June 14, 2018.
Charlie Wirene was hired to manage the buildings and The HUUB. As a former contractor and graduate of the Parsons Design and Urban Ecologies program at the New School, “Charlie has a really good sense of city making and a really good sense of how you care for buildings,” says Fullilove. “That was a remarkable match because we had buildings and we wanted to build community.”
Wirene began by recruiting a group of “listening fellows” — twentysomethings from the neighborhood — to design projects and events that reflect community interests and concerns.
For example, Holly Barszcz started a monthly potluck dinner that draws a cross-section of neighbors to the parish hall. Khemani Gibson hosted an “immigrant dreams roundtable” to get recent arrivals more engaged in civic life. Ray Sykes put on a quarterly hip-hop concert series. Stephen Batiz launched an after-school art studio for kids.
The fellows also collaborate on group projects. After a recent spike in gang violence that left community members hurting and scared, the fellows co-led a workshop on collective recovery from trauma.
Some of the fellows’ projects are ephemeral; others, including the potlucks and art studio, are ongoing. All provide a hotline from the community to the church. “It’s a way of getting to know our neighbors, not coming in with answers from the outside,” Wirene says.
But there was still the problem of the raccoon, and the falling plaster, which would take money to fix. So the church turned to ioby, the nonprofit crowdfunding platform. In addition to providing an online platform for receiving tax-free donations, ioby coached the team at First UU on how to frame their message and craft a fundraising plan.
“Not having a lot of development or fundraising experience, it was great to have a framework and guide to build from,” says Wirene, adding that the platform’s intensive support helps demystify what can be an intimidating process. “Ioby gave us strategies and tools, which is super helpful when you’re talking about money — kind of a taboo topic.”
The crowdfunding campaign met its target: over a month in 2018, First UU raised $35,115 on ioby for The HUUB, mostly from church neighbors, congregants, and friends. Another ioby campaign in 2019 netted nearly $21,000. The online campaigns leveraged other donations, including matching grants from the Fund for Unitarian Universalist Social Responsibility and a gift from a major donor.
Altogether, Wirene says The HUUB’s various fundraising efforts brought in more than $117,000 in two years, enough to fix the leaky roof, replaster and paint the walls, and banish the raccoon.
But the benefits of the fundraising campaign are not just financial. “Over time, you’re building your story, you’re building your supporter base, you’re building enthusiasm,” says Fullilove. “People don’t just give money. They come to events, they take part.”
“Over time, you’re building your story, you’re building your supporter base, you’re building enthusiasm,” says Fullilove. “People don’t just give money. They come to events, they take part.”
Organizations from the neighborhood routinely use the HUUB space. There are diaper drives and concerts, sewing classes, theater rehearsals, and “Know Your Rights” trainings for immigrants. There are Bible-study groups and religious services led by local congregations that sublet from The HUUB. There are parties and weddings and post-funeral repasts.
The church rents out some of its refurbished space to groups that serve the community. The anchor tenant is the University of Orange, a “free people’s university that builds collective capacity for people to create more equitable cities.” The school, founded by Fullilove and Orange residents, organizes an annual Music City Festival that showcases local talent. Other tenants include the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the Laundry Workers Center, and the Lanbi Center for Humanities and Civics, which provides support and citizenship classes to Haitian immigrants.
And, in the midst of it all, First UU lives on — as a church. “We had to figure out what were we going to do without a minister,” Fullilove says. “Some said, ‘We’re just a community outreach hub,’ and I was like, ‘No, we need to have some form of worship.’ Our guiding principle, from St. James, is: Faith without works is dead, but also works without faith is dead.”
In that spirit, the church developed a monthly lay-led service where invited speakers talk about their faith and works. Today, for the first time in years, First UU’s membership is growing. Still, as a student of American cities, Fullilove understands the limits of this work.
“So much of our research has been watching how cities have trashed poor minority communities and how states have trashed poor minority cities, and the power of that trashing is so great that it’s a larger system. For the people embedded within it, it’s like a tsunami of disinvestment,” she says. “So, you’ve got to look at assets, you’ve got to look at protective factors, but you’ve also got to stop the trashing.”
But one virtue of asset-based community development is that it builds skills and capacities that can’t be taken away. Fullilove likens it to the black community’s work to promote literacy during Reconstruction. “People got educated as fast as they could,” she says. “Then, even with the defeat of Reconstruction, you couldn’t take away that knowledge.”
“People got educated as fast as they could. Then, even with the defeat of Reconstruction, you couldn’t take away that knowledge.”
The threats keep coming. The latest, Fullilove says, is a plan to demolish some of Orange’s historic Main Street (a key community asset) and put market-rate housing in its place.
Still, First UU and The HUUB continue their patient, necessary work: nurturing the capacities of their neighbors, and providing space — literal and otherwise — to define and solve problems. Whatever the future holds for this city and its people, those capacities will endure.
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Laurie Mazur is the editor of the Island Press Urban Resilience Project, which is supported by The Kresge Foundation and The JPB Foundation.
This article was originally published in the December 2019/January 2020 issue of The Progressive.
