An interview with An Interview with Rev. Raymond Rivera of the Latino Pastoral Action Center

Rev. Raymond Rivera Rev. Raymond Rivera is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Latino Pastoral Action Center, which serves the Highbridge community in New York City's South Bronx. The center offers various holistic programs, such as its New Hope After School Academy, a Welfare-to-Work program, the Greater Heights recreational program, the P.R.A.I.S.E. gang intervention program, and a program providing GED/ESL/SAT classes. It also operates a charter school, the Family Life Academy. Rivera has been a community activist, pastor, preacher and community organizer for more than 35 years, and he has been instrumental in helping many churches start their own faith-based nonprofit organizations.

The Roundtable: What is your perspective on the faith-based initiative? Rev. Rivera: There’s not a lot of new money in this initiative, but I don’t think that’s where the power of the initiative lies. There’s already money in social service programs and we need to gain access to this existing money. There’s a social service apparatus in this country that is not always very well run, and faith-based organizations should have access to the source of funding. In the Judeo-Christian tradition you can minister with or without the system. One of the complications is a built-in creative tension when you work for the state. For faith-based ministries like ours, we receive funds, but always with the understanding that we’re not going to bow to the state. There’s a tension between the prophetic role and the state’s mandate. But we can work within the system. Second and third generation Latinos have been influenced in the Pentecostal and Evangelical churches and what informs them is the perspective of the poor. There is an indigenous church, an infrastructure growing from congregations, that are looking to make their ministries holistic and they are developing community ministries as extensions of their congregations. The Roundtable: Does the Latino Pastoral Action Center receive government money? Rev. Rivera: Yes, but it has nothing to do with the faith-based initiative. We have a congressional grant that comes from the Department of Justice. We just got a national grant from Americorps because we’ve had an Americorps program for five years. We just received a five-year grant to take our faith-based program to five states -- California, Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. We do not receive funding from the Compassion Capital Fund. There were probably 16 recipients of the Compassion Capital Fund, and one of those was a Latino organization. To us, that’s probably progress because the funding resource in this country is still a white and black conversation. The social service structure in this country has been basically mainline dominated. Most of the money has gone to Catholic Charities, Lutheran Community Services, Episcopalian Mission Society, and Salvation Army. They’ve done a good job, but they’re primarily white. I’m not saying they don’t service our people. But we’re beyond service. We also want to create infrastructure and create institutions. There’s room for indigenous organizations that are closer to the community now. We were doing this work before the initiative. We’re going to continue after, whether there’s a Democrat or a Republican in the White House. We’ve been in existence for about 15 years, so we were accessing public funding before this happened, and we are going to continue to encourage our churches to do this. Some of them will come together as intermediaries. Some will be like ours, where they get direct funding. But we think that our people will take a more active role and get some of those tax dollars and grants. The Roundtable: There have been critics who say that the Bush Administration is using the faith-based initiative to garner votes among African-Americans. Do you think the same could be said for attracting Latino voters? Rev. Rivera: I’m sure that he’s going to use whatever opportunity he can. That sounds like such an ironic argument to say that this never happens with any party that’s in control. Money is political, so I’m sure Bush is trying to use it to his advantage. But if it were Gore, he would have done the same thing. Is the President trying to gain more Latino Republicans? Of course. But I don’t think it’s just the faith-based initiative. I think it’s in everything that he tries to do. I think there is a trend in the country -- one that we’ve seen in the Bush election and the Pataki election here in New York -- where more Latinos have voted Republican. Is that a trend? Is that candidate specific? I think it’s still too early to decide. There’s a whole group of new immigrants who didn’t live through the Civil Rights movement and didn’t experience discrimination, so I think they’re up for grabs. They’re really fertile ground for Republicans and I think that’s where they’re trying to make some inroads. The Latino population is not a homogeneous community. There might be total support on some issues like cultural preservation or bilingual education. The Christian Coalition was very strong in other places, but when it came to New York it failed miserably because even though there are a lot of Pentecostals and Evangelicals in New York City, they’re not the same as Pat Robertson. Where the affinity sometimes converges, unfortunately, is on the whole pro-life issue and the anti-gay issue, which is part of the moral agenda. But on issues of housing, welfare, and jobs, a Pentecostal from New York, black or Latino, and a Pentecostal from Virginia Beach will differ significantly. The Roundtable: What do you think is the most controversial part of the faith-based initiative? Rev. Rivera: We think the most controversial issue of the faith-based initiative is whether funds should be provided for social services in programs that are faith-permeated. Some of our programs are not faith-specific, we just serve the people. But other programs, such as rehabilitation for addiction, have a model that you convert to Jesus Christ to help with the transformation. Some more secular groups say, “No, that shouldn’t be done with government money.” But there’s a world view of humanism, so to say that some of these other programs in the marketplace are value-free is not true. They certainly have values. It’s just that they’re not coded religious values.. While we’re not one of those programs, we don’t see why people can’t choose to go into those programs that are faith-specific. And if those programs work, I don’t see why they can’t be supported. There may be some constitutional issues why they can’t be supported, but there are other ideologies in the marketplace that do get supported. It might not be called God, but there is some value that you have to embrace. So in a real pluralistic world, the "God" programs and the secular programs would all be at the table with no discrimination. I think the benefit of the Bush contribution is that we’re addressing these questions. Some people say the faith-based initiative came as part of the welfare reform bill at the end of the Clinton administration, with charitable choice provisions. But I think President Bush has really fleshed this out and pushed it further. I think all of this is in reaction to his efforts. Another, perhaps unintentional, contribution of this whole faith-based initiative is it has opened up the possibility for more indigenous community organizations to enter the social service system -- one that has historically been monopolized by one group. So I think that the contribution that we bring is that we make it more diverse, we make it more indigenous. We can be part of this social service renewal. The Roundtable: Thank you for speaking with us.