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!