Faith-Based Organizations as Safe Spaces

Faith-Based Organizations as Safe Spaces

(Pamela Leong, Center for Religion and Civic Culture, University of Southern California, 2004)
 
          Low income urban residents often spend their days in dangerous environments. Not surprisingly, they consider the experience of safety a highly valued gift. Many effective faith-based organizations (FBOs), as a result, are deliberate about creating “safe spaces” as they deliver social services. They make it a priority.
 
          Over and over, participants from such FBOs report that they feel respected, even loved, when they interact with other participants, volunteers, and staff members in programs operated by such organizations. As one participant from one such program observed, “This place feels like home. I feel safe here. These people help me feel safe.”
 
          FBO leaders create safe spaces in a variety of ways:
 
1. Safe relationships. FBO staff help program participants to experience safe relationships. This happens through friendships in which participants feel affirmed and supported. These are the kind of relationships that a participant described in the following way: “They believed in me,” she said. “They stood by me, and they worked hard with me. They never gave up,” even in times of personal transgressions.
 
          Staff members caution that “safe relationships” are not the same as “protective relationships.”   They do not want to nurture dependency by doing things for participants that create dependency. Participants have to stand on their own. But they need relationships that can withstand any strain that might occur.
 
          Staff and volunteers of one job training program studied explained that safe relationships promote the participants’ self-esteem, confidence, and ability to take initiative. To help ensure that healthy bonds are being formed, staff meet together to share stories about the friendships they are trying to establish with participants, brainstorming and critiquing one another.
 
          The pastor of a congregation that sponsors an after-school center agrees with the safety-creating strategies adopted by the job training program. Participants need safe, supportive relationships, he emphasized. They benefit deeply from the kind of security that can be created by someone who will accompany them through the stresses of the program and through personal crises--someone who will function as a confidante, and who will provide advice, wisdom, and encouragement. “Usually it takes a mentor,” this pastor adds.
 
2. Safe physical spaces. The job training program examined prepares participants to launch small businesses, especially ethnic food services. It provides training in marketing, licensing procedures, food safety standards, and financial management. Participants lease vending carts, then sell “home-made” tamales to passers-by on streets that border a public park. But this park historically has the reputation of being among the city’s most active centers for drug sales. Consequently, the FBO encourages its micro-entrepreneurs to work with other neighborhood stakeholders in promoting safety within their community.
 
          The vendors are taught that neighborhood safety and business development go hand-in-hand. Along with program administrators, they pressure law enforcement agencies to maintain an active crime-fighting presence. They work with the city’s urban redevelopment agency to bring musical groups and other street performers into the park to create a friendly, safe environment that can be enjoyed by families. In the future, the micro-entrepreneurs want to make the small restaurant where they prepare their tamales into a community center which would offer free meeting space to community groups. Their aim is to vastly increase law-abiding foot traffic in the neighborhood.
 
3. Safety-creating skills. Some FBOs provide specific self-defense classes to help participants learn how to protect themselves in high-risk neighborhoods. One family resource center studied, for example, not only teaches its participants how to dress-for-success and prepare a winning resume. It also trains participants in protecting their bodily safety.
 
          Back at the FBO that launches new ethnic food vendors, staff approach this issue with a twist. They suggest to program participants that cultivating marketable job skills will promote their own sense of personal safety. Staff explain that they want participants to regard their involvement in the program as a step that they are taking to protect themselves from the “violence” of self-doubt and self-destructive relationships. We tell them, program leaders report, that “job skills are like armor.”
 
          Drawing on these examples, here are some general principles that safety-minded human service programs should consider:
 

• Maintaining the safety of physical and geographic spaces is crucial, because the safety of physical space largely determines individuals’ physical and psychological well-being. An individual’s safety, or perceived feeling of safety, is tied to the well-being of a neighborhood. Program participants must be able to enter and exit the FBOs’ physical space without discomfort or fear.
• Psychological safety should be considered. Clients need to feel comfortable talking about their needs and concerns, and FBO staff members should listen to clients without being judgmental.
• Finally, as a part of their curriculum, faith-based programs should consider teaching women, men, girls, and boys how to keep themselves safe in the larger society. This might involve as explicit an approach as offering self-defense classes. But it can also mean framing programs—such as those that emphasize life skills, job training, educational tutorials, parental skills, and so forth--in such a way as to communicate that the skills learned are “safety-creating,” since the quest for safety is so often a dominant theme in participants’ everyday activities.