Research Project: ACTS (Allied Churchs Teaching Self-Empowerment)

The ACTS program was started initially by the staff at St. Michael Church in 1992. After a few years, two other churches, St. Rose and St. Francis of Assisi combined their efforts along with St. Michael to formally incorporate ACTS Community Development Corporation. The program was set in place by the residents of the area along with staff at these churches to help clean up the area from the ground up.

This program began to be put together in the late 1980's when the crime rates in the area around St. Michael Church where at some of their all time highs. The lack of responsibility in the area led to greater violence and overall low living conditions in the neighborhood. The programs initial goal was to clean up the area, and make it better not only for the people coming in, but also for the residents who had lived there for awhile.

What ACTS does is work with the people in the community to allow for new immigrants, mainly from Laotian and Hmong ethnicity, and people that have been here for awhile to purchase a new home. What the program has done has put people in charge of the area they live in by empowering them to by a home, and by doing so caring about the area that they live in. The founding churches along with the ACTS staff work regularly to help coordinate several activities to keep the area clean. These activities can vary from cookouts and bake sales to planned clean up the neighborhood weekends, on a monthly basis.

ACTS also offers services, which includes one-on-one credit counseling, one-on-one home-buying counseling, real estate brokerage, down payment grants, rehab management and funding, and port-purchase assistance. All of these services are available on a daily basis to the residents from an area reaching all the way from Oklahoma Ave. to Capitol Dr. and from 40th St. to a little past Martin Luther King Dr.

More information about the ACTS Organization and their cause can be found at www.actshousing.org

Final Reflection

After a semester of taking of Film 150: Multicultual America, I have definitely broadened my horizons when it comes to present day issues of race and class differences. Throughout the semester, I worked with St. Michael's Congregation in several activities, mainly related to helping out a mainly immigrant population in Milwaukee from countries within Southeast Asia. The ethnicities according to our book would definitely be considered Asian, but while talking with the residents of the area, I could definitely tell there were a lot of differences in each individual culture.

The activities that I personally helped with wee several area cleanup projects, which were run by St. Michael's Congregation and ACTS, a program set up by St. Michael's to help clean up the area, which had hit crime rate highs in the 1970's and 1980's when the primarily white population started to move to the suburbs or pass away. While participating in this activity, I found that these people, though low-income, had a lot of self-respect and self-confidence. They had these qualities, because they own their own homes, and help to keep the community clean.

The other activity, which I worked on at the end of the semester, was a Soup Sale, which was held at St. Michael's congregation on Sunday, December 13, 2009. The soup sale was held after the first mass in the morning, which was a multi-cultural mass. This multicultural mass was held in not one, not two, but three different languages to accommodate all of the immigrants that lived in the area. It also had a unique feel to it, but when people started to sing, in their own languages, it kind of made sense. Though the words were all mixed in, it seemed as though there was a certain harmony to it, which was just plain out phenomenal. During the soup sale itself, I found that the people within the community although from different countries were able to find certain similarities, which made them stronger together as a group. Also, I was able to find that there was a certain mixture of cultures as I was told that the food was made up of different cultures. For example, small differences in spices, within the egg rolls, made it based more from one particular country as opposed to another, something that I would have never known otherwise. (An egg roll is an egg roll is an egg roll to me.)

Overall throughout this semester, I feel that it was a great success that helped me to broaden my horizons. Not only in a sense of being more ethnically aware of certain stereotypes, but also in a sense of class difference. I feel that from going forward, this class has helped me to be less judgmental as I’ve realized there are more restrictions out there in the world, than I initially thought.

The Mission of UWM Service Learning

The UWM Institute of Service Learing's purpose is to offer students service experiences that enrich academics, build critical thinking skills and foster a sense of civic responsibility. Service learning connects students with the real world side of their coursework, bringing social and cultural issues into focus and providing significant benefits to the more than 200 local nonprofit organizations which host our students.

Artist Statement on St. Michael Catholic Church Project

This project took me several days to put together, but the majority of the time was spent interviewing several members of the St. Michael’s Catholic Church staff, mainly Sister Alice Thepouthay and Blong Yang. Sister Thepouthay and Mr. Yang are integral parts within the parish that welcome in new immigrants to the parish from Southeastern Asia and help them to adapt to what Sister Thepouthay calls “the double struggle of language and poverty”.

During this project, I learned one very important lesson over again, which is “You can’t always read a book by its cover.” When coming up to the St. Michael Catholic Church, I figured that it would be a church that would be fairly run down based on its location, however, as I found out, it was quite to the contrary. The church was very much alive and well, being one of the pillars of righteousness on which this particular neighborhood was turned around on.

I felt that throughout the project it was important to not only give a small history of where the church once was, but where it is today through images. Therefore, I started off the photo documentary by using a vintage photo to show the church and its original surroundings, and the church as it stands today. For the next step, I felt to give the proper representation about the parish, that the most important part to focus on would be the diversity. The diversity was illustrated through the images of various different types of art present throughout the church.
These different styles of art demonstrated how even a church could adapt to its congregation.

The last few images illustrate what has happened to the area surrounding the church in recent years. The convent has been changed into a building used for various Hmong and Laotian women community activities, and the grade school has changed into the Urban Day School, one of two schools that help to get 3 and 4 year olds ready for grade school. The last photo is a picture taken of a few of the houses in the neighborhood, which appeared like any house you would see in most of the suburbs of Milwaukee. This goes against the stereotypical idea of many inner city Milwaukee houses, and surrounding area, as being run down, which attests to the effort put in by the members of the St. Michael’s parish

I’d like to thank both Sister Alice Thepouthay and Blong Yang for their hospitality and openness with this project. I really appreciated all the help you were able to offer me during this project, and I hope to be of service to your parish in the near future.

St. Michael Catholic Church

St. Michael’s Catholic Church was founded in 1882, but the church that is present today was not finished until May 15, 1892. This church was built in the old European-style, reflecting the style of church seen by many of the immigrants in their European homelands, with solid walls made of numerous rocks, which were actually imported from Germany, tall stained glass windows, and a steeple, which reached to the heavens. Later additions to the parish including buildings for the grade school, confirmed classes graduated as early as 1891, and a convent.

The congregation remained the same for the remainder of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century until unlawful “block-busting” techniques were used by real estate agents and the crime rates began to rise as the majority of the older German population moved further out to the suburbs in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. This shift in population left St. Michael’s congregation numbers to dwindle. A new mixed population moved in, made up primarily of African American, Spanish, Laotian, and Hmong, the last two ethnic groups which were primarily made up of refugees from the Vietnam War. This transition in the neighborhood’s demographics not only sparked a change in the area, but also a change in the church’s priorities moving forward.

During this time of transition, both the overall crime rates, in general, and hate crimes, against the Laotian and Hmong, reached their peaks. However, over time the church coupled with the local police department, neighborhood residents, and several other organizations began to turn things around. With the change in priorities for the church and the overall effort to clean up the neighborhood, not only crime wise but also sanitary wise, it decided to give up both the school and convent. These buildings did not go to waste; however, as the school was soon under new management as Urban Day School and the convent was turned into a building used by Hmong and Laotian women for various activities.

In 1994, the church helped organize the Allied Churches Teaching Self Empowerment (ACTS) organization, which mission is to “increase affordable homeownership and improve central city housing stock through affordable rehab. Supporting low-income families in these ways builds their ability to be self-empowered, and increases the viability of central city neighborhoods.” By doing this, the church strengthened the community as a whole bringing people together who wanted to work to keep their neighborhood both safe and clean.

St. Michael’s is currently the only church in the Milwaukee Archdiocese, which has mass in four different languages, Lao, Hmong, Spanish, and English. It is arguably the most diverse congregation in the archdiocese, having members from almost every ethnic background from around the globe.

The staff keeps busy every day of the week helping to organize various social events throughout the year, working with ACTS, and to help newly located immigrants from Southeastern Asia. The various social events include a semi-annual eggroll sale that not only help to raises funds for the church, $19,000.00 in the most recent sale, but also bring the community closer together. The staff continues to help new immigrants from Southeast Asia, especially Sister Alice Thepouthay and Blong Yang, grow accustomed to the American lifestyle, which Sister Thepouthay refers to as “the double struggle of language and poverty”.