And as the COVID pandemic tore through our region, disproportionately affecting our most vulnerable residents, COPA helped pass renter protections in Santa Cruz County, and helped in creating Project VIDA, a Monterey County program that employed over 100 community health workers to get people tested, vaccinated and connected to isolation resources to enable our economy to reopen. COPA helped create Esperanza Care, a full-scope health-care program in Monterey County for nearly 5,000 undocumented residents. When these are widely felt, they become the issues that COPA works on.ĬOPA leaders have worked to keep libraries open in Salinas, get affordable housing built across the region, and to pass school funding measures. In these conversations we begin to hear about each other’s needs and concerns, and we develop the trust necessary to act together. Relationships are formed, we move out of our bubbles, and we learn about each other. The power that built COPA and has sustained 20 years of organizing work is relational power - the work begins in hundreds of conversations within and beyond our member institutions. Founded in 2003, COPA represents 25 member institutions from Monterey and Santa Cruz counties. The result of this partnership is COPA: Communities Organized for Relational Power in Action. We contacted the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the nation’s oldest and largest community organizing network, and asked it to help us build a broad-based, multi-issue organization with the power to impact local decisions. Those of us in leadership of congregations and other civic institutions know intimately about the needs of our people, and we are called by our various faith traditions to work toward the common good. But when we showed up to meetings where key decisions would be made, we were dismissed and sent back to our places of worship. Local clergy responded, organizing charitable efforts to help those affected. It was 1995 when the Pajaro River last flooded this badly. Vicky Elder, COPA Leader, Unity of Monterey Bay and
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