Meet Mattie Jordan-Woods, Advocate for Economic Justice

Mattie Jordan-Woods/Second Wave Media

Mattie Jordan-Woods has been the Executive Director of the Northside Association for Community Development (NACD) for over 30 years. I recently had a chance to chat with her. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

 

You’ve been the Executive Director of the NACD since 1987. Initially, you were going to stay for two years. Why did you decide to take the position, and what has kept you there for more than three decades?

My mother was always active in her community. She instilled in me to be part of the solution. During the first two weeks at NACD, I felt as if I didn’t know much of anything! Often people come into a leadership position with pre-conceived notions. But the NACD Board told me what they needed from me. They had fought the good fight. I stayed with NACD because I fell in love with the neighborhood. There is a strong sense of pride within this community.

 

Describe yourself in one word or sentence.

Most people say I don’t give up, I’m tenacious.

 

What is the proudest accomplishment you’ve had at the NACD?

I really believe getting the grocery store (Park Street Market) was the biggest success. It engaged community residents and the business community as well. The community partnership made it happen. Without the support of neighborhood residents and the larger community, it wouldn’t have happened. It was a multi-cultural, multi-community engagement.

One lesson we learned from the grocery store project is that if the community owns the land, the original intent of the project remains. It’s a testimony to the power of neighbors working together.

 

What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced in your tenure with NACD?

There are so many organizations that use poverty statistics of a neighborhood to prove their effectiveness, but never have to prove that they’ve made a real difference. That’s mainly because rarely are people who propose and implement projects actually living in the neighborhood where the projects are being done. So, there’s no sustainability.

My biggest regret has been not ensuring that the (Park Street) grocery store was fully paid for.

Another challenge is addressing environmental racism. An example would be chemical-based industries located within low-income neighborhoods. This affects households who already are dealing with a lack of resources.

 

How has Kalamazoo changed during the five decades that you’ve lived here?

The evolution of different groups making decisions as to what happens in Kalamazoo. And the positive changes in local government and in public safety.

But there’s still inconsistency. For example, residents living in low-income neighborhoods are told there’s a process to implement change, but developers don’t always follow that process. We need to consider how to address the trauma of individuals paying taxes, living in these neighborhoods, for years, being told there’s a process, but some developers with a lot of money go around that process.  Real change comes when there’s an acknowledgment of the inconsistency. It’s one thing to have a meeting and talk about it (inconsistency), it’s another thing to implement change.

Oftentimes in situations like this, it’s the difference between unconscious and conscious bias. Unconscious bias is worse because it takes longer to reverse the deliberate harm it causes.

 

How has Covid-19 impacted the Northside community?

People who are the least likely prepared, technology-wise, were affected the most. They may have paid their taxes, but if the technology recording the payment malfunctioned, they don’t have a way to address the oversight.

Remote learning is another way Covid-19 has impacted the Northside. You can’t really expect heads of low-income households to become teachers overnight. There may be children from three different grade levels living in one home. If you don’t have the money (for additional computers) or adequate space in your home to do remote learning it’s difficult.

On the positive side, Kalamazoo has a lot of (philanthropic) donors who want to make a difference. And foundations have revisited what they will fund to help address these Covid-related challenges.

 

If you had one piece of advice to pass on, what would it be?

Stop making decisions in a box. The people who are going to be affected by a decision should be involved in the decision-making process. NACD provides a way for Northside residents to have an opportunity to speak. And eighty percent of the NACD board members have to be from the Northside neighborhood. 

Is there anything else you'd like to mention?

NACD is not the only organization on the Northside that has resident input and decision-making authority, several resident-led groups in the neighborhood are making a difference physically and through the power of the vote!  I have volunteered at some of their events and have seen the impact they are making in our residents' lives.

Here's another, more extensive interview, focusing on the NACD's recent business development on Kalamazoo's Northside.

Life At Canaan Orchard

Dave in his element at Canaan Orchard/Photo by John Grap

Last weekend was the final weekend for U-Pick apples at Canaan Orchard.

It's a four-acre plot of land with 20 different varieties of apples, along with a few plum, nectarine and pear trees.

Canaan is surrounded on three sides by cornfields. Located on a 100-year-old homestead.

It's the orchard my brother Dave manages. 

And he's really, really good at it.

Beginning in April, Dave begins pruning branches and sucker growth off the trees. It takes skill to know what to cut and what to leave on the tree. The pruning promotes not only new growth, but better fruit.

After the pruning is completed - which includes a bonfire or two of discarded branches - comes thinning of the apple sets.

This work is meticulous and necessary and results in larger apples. This is definitely a case where less is more.

Dave is one of the most patient, hard-working people I know, and the proof is in Canaan Orchard.

Dave reciting "The Brook"

But it isn't all work.

In early April, I was there watching Dave work, and at one point, he set on his shovel and began to recite "The Brook," by Alfred Lord Tennyson. It's one of the poems that our Dad had us memorize as kids, growing up in the summer. 

"The Brook" is made up of 13 stanzas. Dave re-memorized them all and did his orchard-view recitation on April 7th, to honor our Dad's birthday.

This year there was summer pruning added to the mix, happening about a month before harvest. More branches cut. Another bonfire. This time on a very hot August afternoon. So hot, that it was impossible to stand within twenty yards of the fire after it got started.

I learned, first-hand, about the power of fire.

Before we knew it, U-Pick season was about to start. 

Typically, that begins the Thursday after Labor Day weekend and continues through mid-October. It normally includes six weekends, where my brother Dominic and I share U-Pick duties with Dave. Dominic and I take turns helping to staff the "Info Booth," on weekends to welcome and help direct customers. 

I'd estimate that ninety-five percent of the customers we greet are folks who have been to Canaan before. It's a testament to Dave's good-natured personality that they keep coming back.

No matter how busy it gets, Dave always takes the time to chat, letting customers know which varieties of apples are ripe, and where to find them. He engages each of them. Asks how their families have been and is genuinely interested in how they've been since last apple season.

Because of Dave's kindness, many customers give him homemade relish, pies, honey, maple syrup and family recipies. Some folks have even bartered with Dave exchanging tortillas for apples.

In preparation for harvest time, Dave pulls out some totes (large bins), placing two of them on a special trailer which becomes the official Information Stand for Canaan. (This year, my sister Deborah came up with a handy listing of the twenty different varieties of apples at Canaan, along with their taste and use for each).

During this busy time, the Michigan weather can fluctuate. From relatively warm and sunny in early September into not-so-warm and overcast of mid-October. But no matter the weather, Dave is faithfully there. (This year Dominic picked up a couple of mitts and a baseball at a garage sale and took them to Cannan. Last Saturday, I was really happy that we had them to keep warm by playing catch, in-between greeting customers). 

After the U-Pick season closes, it's time to prepare Canaan Orchard for the winter months. This includes delivering a few last pecks of apples - including some to the Catholic sisters at a Congregation of St. Joseph convent nearby. (Sister Grace, the sister who places the apple orders is continually in motion, from morning until late evening. Mostly doing things for other people.)

Since retiring, I've been privileged to go to Canaan and hang out with Dave each season for seven years.

Each season goes by quicker than the last.

Each season provides moments where Dave freely shares his patience and love of the outdoors.

Each season provides times of conversation about faith, philosophy, and life as he goes about the work of nurturing the orchard and our friendship.

Each season provides opportunities to simply spend time soaking in the presence of one of the wisest most hard-working, gentle persons I know. 

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And now, here's two, final photos capturing the close-out of Canaan for this season!

The trees and ground are clean! Not an apple to be found. Although the last day I was with Dave at Canaan, he found a (red) Jonathon apple, while I found one last (yellow) delicious still hanging from the tree!

A Conversation With Sister Emily TeKolste, of NETWORK Social Action Network

Sister Emily TeKolste/Global Sister Report

Sister Emily TeKolste is a temporary professed Sister of Providence of St. Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana. Originally from the Indianapolis area, she developed a passion for justice during her time as a student at Xavier University in Cincinnati and lived in the Indianapolis Catholic Worker community for three years before entering her community. She is the author of the blog So Long Status Quo and ministers as grassroots mobilization coordinator for NETWORK Social Action Network in Washington, D.C.

You lived with the Indianapolis Catholic Worker Community in Indianapolis. How did that experience shape your life? 

I like to joke that I found my best friends on Google because that’s how I found the Worker. It was the first time in my adult life after moving back to the city I grew up in that I felt like I’d found my people. It was also at the Catholic Worker that I met the Sisters of Providence, so that’s a pretty significant impact. I’m also still in touch with many people from that time and try to visit when I can.

My time at the Worker also still informs what I look for in the local community as a Sister of Providence – hospitality, shared projects, involvement in the neighborhood, affiliating myself with those who are most marginalized in our society, and so on. While I haven’t always had the opportunity to have those experiences for a variety of reasons, they remain a part of the ongoing conversation and discernment of what I and we are working towards.

 

How about your experience with the Dorothy Day Center for Faith & Justice? And working in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati?

If it hadn’t been for the Dorothy Day Center for Faith & Justice, I probably wouldn’t have known to look for a Catholic Worker community in Indianapolis. It really is the little things like who you name your programs after that can make a huge difference in planting seeds that blossom in entirely unexpected ways. 

Honestly, though, I could talk ad infinitum about how my time at Xavier broadly shaped me. It really is true what they say about a Jesuit education, that it ruins you for life. I’d had minimal exposure to questions of justice before starting at Xavier, but I knew I wanted to do more service and to do service outside of my suburban bubble. Thanks to the Peace and Justice Programs (a precursor to CFJ), I started this program billed as “get to know the city of Cincinnati through service” – we went to do service with a different organization each week. Then for the second semester, they told us the story of the babies in the river and said that it was time for us to go upriver and see why the babies were being thrown in the river to begin with. We spent that semester going to organizations around the city that worked on justice and talking about the injustices that exist in our society. Those experiences really set me on a path to prioritize justice in my studies and extra-curricular activities at Xavier and beyond. 

Which leads to your current work with being Grassroots Mobilization Coordinator for NETWORK. What attracted you to this work?

I first got involved with NETWORK (other than attending a Nuns on the Bus event) in 2016 when I was a postulant and had helped start a local group of activists wanting to prepare ourselves and do the work we needed to do to protect our values in the wake of the election of President Trump. But then I moved to Illinois to start ministry in a high school. After that clearly wasn’t working out, a friend pointed me to NETWORK. I applied initially for a one-year program and was offered a full-time staff position instead. I’ve been here just over two years now. 

But perhaps more relevant is what I love about the work that I do. Because I get to spend my workday doing things I would have previously just done in my free time. And I have the support of an incredible organization behind me. I get to embrace my nerdy side, I get to engage with people who care about justice and help them become stronger justice advocates, and I get some incredible opportunities to do the ongoing work of personal reflection. 

Photo Credit: National Catholic Reporter

In your position with NETWORK, you’re involved with Tax Justice. This includes advocating for raising the corporate tax rate (to 28%), curbing offshore corporate tax dodging, higher taxes on the most (those earning more than $1 Million annually), restoring a top individual tax rate of 39.6% and cracking down on tax evasion (by increasing funding to the IRS). Why is this work important?

Yeah, I actually kind of stumbled into this work when my team was looking at developing a new workshop. Thanks to the wisdom and direction of a couple of incredible Associates I got to work with at the beginning of the project (Alex Burnett and Giovana Oaxaca), it really became a close look at how tax justice is integral to racial justice – and the possibility that exists with just a few small changes. Developing this workshop, I’ve become so much more aware of so many ways my own white privilege was so invisible for so long. 

Among other things, reform of the tax code matters because massive inequality is bad for everyone. In organizing terms, it’s in the self-interest of everyone to make society more equal, and the tax code is a powerful way to do that.

From the perspective of poverty alleviation, the goal is a tax system that raises enough revenues to ensure everyone has what they need to live a life worthy of the dignity they possess. When the ultra-wealthy aren’t paying their fair share (and yet are still getting massive tax breaks to pay sub-poverty wages to their employees and massive payouts to their CEOs and shareholders), we can’t pay for the basic things that every society needs like good schools for all or safe drinking water. But we could easily do all of those things if the ultra-wealthy paid just a little bit more in taxes – an amount they wouldn’t even notice was missing from their daily lives.

From the perspective of justice, it’s critical to know how our tax system currently works and the ways that it’s just blatantly unjust because it was developed with a white heterosexual couple with wealth and a primary breadwinner in mind. It’s designed to serve that couple, and so Black families and immigrant families and even poor white families just don’t get the same kind of advantages that are built into the tax system for wealthy white families. No matter what we look like or where we come from, the ways we fund our social goods should be fair and just. And they’re just not fair or just under the current tax code.

Photo Credit/Sisters of Providence St. Mary of the Woods

NETWORK is driven by a commitment to Catholic Social Justice teaching. I became aware of NETWORK through the Nuns on the Bus tours. They seem to take a particular theme each year. But the work of Network is really pretty encompassing, including immigration reform, economic justice, federal budget priorities, healthcare access and ecological justice. Would you like to mention the significance of a couple of those areas?

Nuns on the Bus has been in existence as a campaign since 2012, but NETWORK is coming up on our 50th Anniversary this April. We’ve been working since 1972 on creating (or protecting) federal policies that address the underlying barriers that people face in everyday life.

It’s critically important to us that we strive to root our work in encounter, in the real lives of the people whose lives our work will impact. These are not abstract theoretical conversations that we’re having – they impact real people in their real lives. In federal legislation, though, that often means tackling less sexy topics like budgets and taxes. The Child Tax Credit expansion at the beginning of this year resulted in a 40% drop in child poverty. That’s exciting! That’s huge! That’s meaningful for real people in their real lives!

I think also of the difference real immigration reform could make, like what would have happened to my friend who had been a DACA recipient working multiple jobs. He lost his DACA status after he made a dumb decision and drove while under the influence of alcohol and then was swept up in a workplace raid at one of his multiple jobs and deported to Mexico, where he hadn’t lived since he was a teenager. My wealthy white uncle made the same dumb decision and had a few consequences like losing his driver’s license temporarily, but he still gets to live near his family and play with his grandbabies. The juxtaposition of these two stories in my life is so stark. What kind of difference would it have made for my friend to have some form of permanent protection? Why does my uncle get so much grace? Why isn’t my friend allowed to be human and make stupid mistakes without paying for them years later?

What does your job as Grassroots Mobilization Coordinator entail, and why are grassroots efforts so important?

Laura Peralta-Schulte, our Chief Lobbyist, says over and over again that we get our power because of our people. Members of Congress want to hear from their constituents. The name NETWORK even comes from that idea – the importance of having a connected and well-engaged network across the country that can take action on issues of critical importance. We can work together on shared strategy. We can build coalitions to work together on issues that matter to a broad variety of people. When we come together, we realize that we’re not alone.

The grassroots are also important because they change the conversation that’s being had in our society. Each of us can shift the conversation in our own lives, and that makes a huge difference. 

We the people have power, and we too often just leave our power sitting on the table – whether it’s because we’re told over and over that we don’t have power or because society is built in a way that’s too distracting or busy for us to get involved. But when we come together, we can do incredible things. 

In your personal life, you became a professed member of the Sisters of Providence of St. Mary of the Woods, Indiana in June, 2019. Could you tell us what motivated this decision? 

Encounter.

I wasn’t looking for religious life, but when I met the Sisters of Providence by way of the Catholic Worker, I just felt something starting to move inside of me. Over time, I really began to feel like I belonged. I was attracted to their work for love, mercy, and justice – and particularly the work for justice. Honestly, I didn’t grow up in a faith community that valued justice. It took a while for me to come back to faith after, among other things, one of my high school youth group leaders essentially told me to leave the Catholic Church because I didn’t think that abortion was the only issue you should vote on (and I shared a document from the USCCB that said as much). With the Sisters of Providence, I could find a way to re-establish a faith life rooted in what I knew was right in terms of working toward a world that truly works for all people.

I’m also really grateful that we don’t have to have the answers, that we have such an array of images of God among ourselves – that in real and tangible ways, we are moving away from God as the old white man in the sky. We embrace the mystery.

Is there anything else you’d like to mention?

I wouldn’t be a very good organizer if I didn’t offer you ways to connect to the work we’re doing. Please feel free to reach out if you want to learn more about our rockstar network of advocates, and especially our state and local Advocates Teams. I may not work directly with advocates in your state, but I can connect you to the right person. My email address is etekolste@networklobby.com. I hope to hear from you!