Meet Trailblazer Kit Danley

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kit Danley. She and her team share her story with us below.

Kit founded Neighborhood Ministries in 1982 and remains the President of the organization today. Kit’s passion to bring authentic change and renewal to the urban community led her and her husband, Wayne, to live in the city and raise their two children there. She has become a champion of the people we serve. Because of the commitment by the Danleys and others to live in and serve the urban community, we have built a culture of trust in the city, laying the foundation for the positive, enduring work that has now spanned three decades. In 2001, we moved into The Neighborhood Center, the newly developed campus of an eight-acre site at 19th Avenue and Van Buren, in the heart of downtown Phoenix. The Neighborhood Center is now the hub where relationships with children, their families, and city-wide partners join together to make a difference for hundreds throughout the community.

In 2007, we wrote the story of NM for our 25th anniversary. Please see as many of the chapters of our book that you might be interested in: http://www.nmphx.com/about/history/

That covers the history.

WHERE WE ARE TODAY
NM has 27 programs on an eight-acre campus, with an additional property off campus serving as a leadership development house and urban farm. We have countless partnerships throughout the area augmenting our diverse holistic programming. Our renovation of one of our historic buildings on our property has won a prestigious architectural award and our early childhood development work is expanding significantly making us one of the places to watch in Phoenix for this effort.

Our mission is to be the presence of Jesus Christ, sharing his life-transforming hope, love, and power
among distressed families of urban Phoenix to ignite their passion for God and His Kingdom.

Our outreach programs meet our community’s most basic needs including food and clothing and youth programs. Our empowerment programs provide case management, academic support, and workforce development.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
I have been in the trenches for almost 40 years. As the founder of a sizable non-profit/faith organization, of course, there have been many difficult seasons and many lessons to learn. I work with a lot of younger women leaders sharing some of these lessons or just mentoring them along the way in their various stages of development. As a gender, women make strong leaders: they are natural ball jugglers, they come at problems normally with a compassionate posture, they are relational, they are resourceful, they work best in team. Of course, these are generalizations, but overall I affirm the unique ways in which they women lead and encourage them how to stay in the game.

Our kind of work is uniquely difficult. We are serving people who are in very complex and layered sufferings from generational poverty to living in the shadows due to immigration status. Our desire is to see people, whole families, and whole communities flourish. My personal goal is to help keep women leaders resourced, encouraged and equipped for a lifetime of service. Following are some of the ways we have articulated lessons learned.

Lessons Learned

Neighborhood Ministries has been at the work of human and community development in Phoenix for a quarter century. God has been good to us and has shown and taught us much. We know there is still a lot to learn and still much God has in store for us—we certainly don’t think we’ve got everything figured out! But we wanted to share some thoughts (by no means exhaustive) about what we’ve experienced in the hopes of encouraging others at work in similar vineyards. We’ve divided our reflections into three groups of lessons.

The first set of lessons concerns what we’ve seen about the dynamics of transformation.

Lesson #1: Change takes time.

Obvious, trite, and unnecessary to mention—right? But from what we’ve seen (and what we’ve sometimes lived), urban workers don’t always function according to this truth. We’ve both been in conversations with ministry practitioners a few years into their work who are lamenting their lack of progress or the backslidings of their former “success story kid.” Careful readers of this book will note that the “miracle” chapter doesn’t come until nearly the end. “Generational poverty” is called that for a reason, and it won’t be overcome quickly or easily. Urban workers need to be prepared to make investments over the long haul. Evidence of transformation may be years in coming; we want to encourage our fellow ministry practitioners to not give in to discouragement.

Lesson #2: There is healing in telling your story. Truth-telling is the means of the deep inner healing needed by those who have been afflicted by others’ sin and guilt-ridden by their own. Neighborhood Ministries has walked alongside adults and youth with wounds that run very, very deep. We have loved on and counseled countless individuals who have been victims of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and neglect. We have ministered to kids who have been abandoned, homeless, and destitute; kids who have watched their mom get beaten, their dad sent to prison, and their siblings die. We are friends with prostitutes and drug addicts and have been in homes where witchcraft is practiced. We have loved on people with multiple personality disorder and families for whom funerals are annual occurrences. Children and families dealing with this level of tragedy, darkness, dysfunction, grief, and brokenness need supernatural intervention; the kind of healing only the all-powerful God of Love can provide. We have discovered that His method always involves the freedom that comes from knowing the Truth (John 8:32).

So, we have instituted all manner of means of truth-telling: counseling, journaling, prayer, intimate retreat settings, and helping people to express themselves through art, music, poetry, and collage. And we have worked hard to create a safe environment where people can tell the truth—the truth about themselves and others. We are committed to unconditional love. That provides the foundation on which people can find the courage to finally tell the truth. They must be confident that they will not be rejected; once that confidence takes hold, then they can dare to reveal their secrets. We are committed to helping people find that confidence and that courage.

This means, in part, being storytellers ourselves. We model the practice of talking vulnerably about our lives. We create space in our leadership development programs for young people to practice telling their stories. And we show people how God is a consummate storyteller. We help them understand the greatest story of all, the story of Jesus and His good news of the Kingdom, and we imitate the parable-speaking Savior in our own Bible curricula.

Lesson #3: Development of indigenous leaders requires intentionality.

Developing indigenous leaders cannot be just a wish, good intention or hope. Ministry organizations will not just drift into it. It has to be a driving force and an ongoing commitment. It is hard, messy, time-consuming work. It also works that brings us some of our greatest joys.

There is so much to say about leadership development that cannot fit within the confines of this book. Let us share just two points.

First, we believe that discipleship is at the core of leadership development. Character formation—maturing in Christlikeness— is the essence; skill building is secondary. Rules and structure can play an important part in discipleship with young Christians (especially those in a recovery context, such as just coming out of prison or off of drugs). These provide tangible boundaries that afford the baby Christian a sense of security and they help mark off as “out of bounds” those practices, typically external, that can drag a person back into old, unhealthy patterns. But over time, the goal must be to help people grow internally, to change in their mind and in their heart. We seek for our young leaders to know, deep in their hearts, that they are loved. From that irreplaceable foundation, we then seek to help them feed on Christ, drawing strength from Him that produces the fruit of the Spirit—self-control, gentleness, compassion, grace. We give increasing levels of responsibility not based on the externals of a person’s growth in skills or their natural and spiritual gifts, but rather, based on their character growth.

Second, we implement leadership development with specific strategies. We offer a “ladder” of leadership roles, starting in middle school. Our Junior High students can serve as small group leaders over younger children in the Monday Night program; to do so, they participate in a special discipleship class that meets on Tuesday nights. Youth can also apply to serve as summer work crew for the Kids’ Club and camp programs. Older youth can apply to become two-year interns at NM. These young people meet weekly for a discussion group, participate in silent retreats, and complete readings and activities through a structured, two-year curriculum we have developed.

Lesson #4: When you have grace as a core value—things can get messy.

Jesus never defines us by our failures. We have learned that most mistakes are not fatal and that often it is in our failures that God is most at work and revealed.

The Apostle John tells us that Jesus showed up full of Grace AND Truth (John 1:14). Because we believe in relationships and truth-telling for all of life, people must be handled graciously. It is great to celebrate the successes in personal growth, but it is just as important to allow for failures.

Sometimes people observe our commitment to grace and love and ask, “Where are the rules around here?” We do give people a thousand chances, and then some because we believe that is how Jesus deals with us. We are careful to avoid “performance treadmills” that only reward behavior but never affirm value for who you are. We stay away from legalism as a way of growth because that doesn’t really work—knowing rules alone only frustrates our hearts. It is all too easy to just become “religious” and when we do so, we often miss the important things—love, justice, mercy, and compassion.

We are not saying that grace allows people to do whatever they want. That would violate truth-telling. But we are saying that just knowing something is true doesn’t transform us. We need real life, real relationships, and real community to know that our growth isn’t linear but spiritual.

While grace does not mean the absence of rules or standards, and wrong actions should always involve consequences, grace lets us strive to be a place where the prodigal can return—where our Father always greets us with open arms. We think this is key to becoming people who love our neighbor as ourselves.

Lesson #5: Mentoring requires a wrap-around approach.

Our commitment to relationships makes it natural for us to incorporate mentoring as a key component of our work. Our educational programs involve matching youth with one-on-one mentor. Our discipleship programs on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights involve small group mentors. We believe unequivocally that a mentor truly can change a child’s life.

But we also recognize the limits of mentoring, alone. Our reading of the research literature and our years of experience confirm that mentors need many years with the same kid (most researchers say 13.) And, with very high-risk kids, one-on-one mentoring alone will not work.

For the kinds of youth we deal with—with multiple risk factors—mentoring is one important but insufficient component of a needed, “wrap-around” strategy. These youth face such a plethora of issues that they will burn out a mentor who feels they are the child’s only support. High-risk youth need to be embedded in several supportive programs, each involving caring adult relationships. They need a holistic approach that addresses their practical needs (which might include shelter, food, transportation, or medical care). Moreover, these kids are inside family systems that need attention; their success in one of our programs is often dependent on the interventions we are trying to make with their parents through other programs.

Lesson #6: We’ve found that we could not do community development without human development.
We are part of the Christian community development movement and have been blessed and amazed by site visits to other ministries where we could see, visibly, the transformation of neighborhoods. We seek that kind of physical and systemic transformation for our own community. We have developed four acres of property in the inner city and are beginning the development of the other four we own. We are committed to launching economic enterprises that create jobs and recycle dollars in our neighborhood. We have purchased and rehabbed homes established a job placement coordinator, and launched a job skills class for youth. We want to tackle economic development issues and change the physical appearance of our community. But we believe that this work cannot replace a commitment to personal transformation. Human development and community development are both necessary and complementary; one should not be allowed to trump the other. We suspect that the sequencing of these twin pursuits will vary from ministry to ministry, depending on each group’s DNA. We emerged from a church committed to evangelism and deep relationships; a focus on human development was a natural fit. We learned to grow into community development and community organizing. Others whose traditions are different might begin with more attention to pure community development; their challenge will be to grow into the vital work of one-on-one discipleship.

Lesson #7: The para-church model is limited. For a ministry among the urban poor to do multi-generational, cycle-breaking ministry, you need a birth-to-grave model. We
believe that God’s design for this is the local church.

By intention, para-church organizations are not birth to grave. They are segmented for a season of life (high school, preschool, etc.) or one type of person (boys, ex-offenders, teen moms, etc.) or one area of need (housing, jobs, etc). Our understanding of holistic ministry moves us in a different direction, a wrap-around approach that recognizes the complexity of people’s lives. We believe, for example, that the needs of children are tied to needs in their family and community, and that these are typically both spiritual and physical.

Neighborhood Ministries is a non-profit organization, but from the beginning, we have been committed to church. We like the fact that our ministry kids refer to “coming to church”–even if that is going to pre-school, or going to get food or to see a doctor, or attending any of our weekly programs. We want people to see church as 24-7, 365—all the time and everywhere.

But there is something sacred about our weekly “Sunday Church.” Here we experience bi-lingual corporate worship. Whole families from throughout our community can gather for prayer, teaching, worship, and sharing of the sacraments. Here we are living out all of life—baptisms, funerals, weddings, baby dedications, Bible Studies, small groups, family events, Sunday school, mission trips, and the sharing of God’s work as we serve in mission together. We have a long life ahead of us, and we are trusting God that as we grow, His Church will endure.

Lesson #8: Transformation requires the pursuit of justice.

When you identify with and become family to the participants in the ministry, and are truly neighbors and co-laborers among them, you have no choice but to enter into solidarity with them when they are victims of injustice or prejudice. Advocacy is organic; it arises out of real-time relationships and real-life situations where power is abused. Pursuing justice is an inevitable part of doing Kingdom work; you cannot read the prophetic literature and wonder whether there’s a role for the church in the public square. We don’t go looking for fights, but we must join our voice with the poor when they are mistreated and oppressed. And we must be attentive to those systemic issues that influence what opportunities are available to the poor and work diligently to protect human and civil rights.

Lesson #9: An intentional pursuit of the contemplative life necessarily accompanies the daily work of urban ministry in the trenches.
Prayer is a core value, as we recognize so intensively our powerlessness and radical dependency on Jesus. No one involved in urban work will deny how hard it is, and the key to lasting and finishing well is feeding on Christ. We have found that in addition to encouraging and practicing individual and corporate prayer, we can refresh our souls through silence, meditation, and the creation’s beauty. We go on annual silent retreats at a local monastery. We have a beautiful prayer garden on campus. We get out into nature (thank you, God, for the beauty of Arizona!). We also read a lot, and encourage our young leaders to read and reflect. We sit at the feet of “saints gone before,” studying the writings of Christians from earlier times. It is not always easy to make time for these things, but we have found it impossible to do our work well in their absence.

Prayer is a core value because we recognize we are not the answer, nor do we have the ability to change hearts and lives. In the situations we face every day it is very apparent that we are not just fighting the negative effects of addictions and the oppressive effects of generational poverty but against spiritual powers and authorities. Spiritual warfare is a constant reality and our need for God to rescue, comfort, strengthen and guide us is foundational to all we do. As 2 Corinthians 3:4-6 teaches, we know that our sufficiency is from God and only through Him can we accomplish anything…

The second set of lessons concerns what we’ve experienced organizationally as we have sought to love God and our neighbor among distressed families in urban Phoenix.

Lesson #10: Work like this requires partnerships.

We are sometimes overwhelmed by the intensity and scale of human need in our community. At those times especially, we are deeply grateful for our partners. We know a lot about limited resources and the need to collaborate with others, inside and outside the faith community. And so we have pursued partnerships. It can be tempting to avoid doing so. After all, partnerships require time, patience, and a lot of communication. Sometimes they are uncomfortable; they create headaches and demand compromise. But we believe we are called to collaboration, not only for the very practical reason that urban work is impossible without it, but also because we believe God is at work in many ways throughout our city, doing His work through many people and organizations. We believe He desires to see us unified with others of His children and friendly with all people of goodwill who share His passion to bring greater shalom to our city.

Lesson #11: Team matters. We have been blessed to be mentored by people who have warned us about the dangers of being “Lone Rangers” and who have helped us embrace community. We think that commitment to community needs to be practiced at the ministry’s highest levels, and so have established a leadership team (Kit, Billy, Jorge, and Richard) that, along with our Board, pursues a consensual decision-making approach.

Lesson #12: Young people are more talented
and more capable than we often imagine.

A lot of work gets done around here and a lot of energy is needed to get it done. We’ve found that young people—teens and twenty-somethings—bring energy and commitment. We don’t believe they should have to wait before investing all that into the ministry. And so, we entrust young leaders (both those from within the community and those who join us in our passions from different backgrounds) with significant responsibilities.

Lesson #13: Organizational growth requires increased attention to synergizing initiatives.

We work with several hundred youths through sixteen programs. This sets us up for classic organizational challenges like the left hand not knowing what the right is doing. Organizations of our size can end up creating silos of effort, where staff can become isolated from one another. This can create duplication, missed opportunities, and even internal turf wars. We’ve put in place a variety of practices to help us avoid such problems. Our entire staff meets monthly and everyone has an opportunity to share an update. We send one another our prayer letters and our email blasts. Once each year we hold a combined Board and staff retreat.

In addition to these communication strategies, we intentionally design new programs in ways that borrow energy and resources from existing ones. For example, all the girls residing in Hope House are required to participate in the Jeremiah Project and are case managed through that program, rather than being assigned a Hope House case manager. And when we launched our Head Start program, children of our Moms’ Place moms got priority enrollment. Our intention is that all of our programs are synergistic by design and not “stand alone” models.

Lesson #14: We need to stay a learning organization.

This involves at least three things. First, we’ve been blessed by researchers who have helped us to understand the literature on human and community development and pointed us toward best practices. We need to continue to invest time and energy to stay current with these kinds of conversations. Second, we’ve been struck by how quickly things can become sacred cows. Once a lot of personal investment goes into an idea, project, or program, it can become extremely difficult to kill it. So we pray that God will help us to be faithful in evaluating what we do, and to be willing to change, or even shut things down when they’re not working. Third, we always need to be listening attentively to God’s Spirit. He has taught us much already; we want to be teachable and receptive to new directions He may have for us.

The final set of lessons concerns what we have seen about how God is at work to shape us as we participate in the transformative work He is doing among us.

Lesson #15: Spiritual formation happens in mission among the dispossessed.

Jesus taught that the Kingdom of God belongs to the poor (Luke 6:20). A journey into the center of God’s heartlands you among the poor and afflicted, the humble and the broken. God hears the groans of the oppressed (Exodus 2:24); God is near to those who are crushed in spirit (Psalms 34:18); God says He cannot be found in worship divorced from doing justice (Isaiah 1:11-17). As disciples, we will be limited in the ways in which we mature in Christ if we do not find ways of entangling ourselves with the poor. God is utterly passionate about justice; He is the defender of widows and the father to the fatherless. He is found in the midst of suffering. Mother Teresa once said that she thought God had allowed poverty on earth in order for Him to change her. We have learned that participating with God in His work of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the imprisoned, healing the sick, and comforting the mourning is the avenue for ever- deeper communion with Him. It is not just the poor who need to be changed by God. We are all equally in need of our Savior.

Lesson #16: Sacrifice is an unavoidable part
of urban ministry.

How can urban workers last in environments of high stress, exposure to trauma, high demands, pressure and heartaches? That is a great question. This type of ministry is hard. But we want to stay in this work long-term! So to do this we have to return to a strong sense of our calling to this type of service and the sacrifices inherent in it.

We try really hard to take good care of each other, our staff, and our volunteers. We don’t fire people because they hit a personal wall or low point. We encourage times of rest. We schedule days for solitude, communal prayer and worship. It is easy to get overwhelmed and we expect emotional and physical suffering. We try to treat each other with grace and honesty and provide times to recover and recharge.

We think of urban ministry like an “extreme sport.” There is high stress. We keep striving to do a radical mission. We keep going after the high-risk kids and severely dysfunctional families. We experience and enter into the reality of their lives. We struggle to be living examples of God’s Kingdom in both faith and practice. We fight corruption in unjust systems in our community. We advocate for those without a voice.

But we are only human. This is God’s work. It is good to work hard, knowing our limits, admitting our shortcomings, so that we can celebrate God’s provision. We learn to find joy in the sacrifice, for His Namesake.

Lesson#17: When we carry a theology of God’s heart for the poor, we inevitably become change agents in the Church.
It’s an unfortunate fact that all Christians find it tempting to fill our lives with things at the periphery of God’s heart instead of those things Micah 6:8 says are at the center: doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly. We are immersed in God’s work in the ‘hood and are active in inviting others to join us. Life

alongside the poor often challenges our priorities, our prejudices, and our materialism. As we see suffering, destitution, and injustice, we seek God, trying to make sense of things and trying to understand what He wants our response to be. Usually, His answer involves taking up the cross and dying to self. That’s extremely uncomfortable. And it means that we become—often unintentionally and reluctantly—holy agitators.

We believe that the urban community has much to offer the suburban church. Urban-suburban partnerships in years past typically focused on the resources that could be brought in by the wealthy. But the giving is not one-way. If anything, we believe that given current trends in the nation, the urban community has much to teach the suburban, well-resourced church.

One important urban change is the decreasing numbers of poor people residing in the center city areas. Urban renewal and gentrification are resulting in the poor moving out into areas once described as suburban. The rich will soon find them nearby. “Urban” issues of diversity and multi-ethnic neighborhoods will become everyone’s issues. The kinds of family breakdown, dysfunction, crime, and drugs that have been mainly associated with urban communities are becoming more common in suburban neighborhoods. All of these trends mean that suburban churches need the wisdom that that their urban brethren have gleaned through hard experience and theological reflection rooted in suffering.

Twenty-five can sound old when it’s the length of time an organization has been around. But in other contexts, the number 25 can signify “young and inexperienced.” We feel both young and old. On the one hand, we share these reflections because a quarter century in the trenches has taught us some things we think are worth committing to paper. On the other hand, we have a strong sense that we still have so much more to learn. So, we commit these thoughts to God and will entrust Him to impress upon our fellow ministry practitioners only those insights that He knows are right and good for their work.

We’d love to hear more about Neighborhood Ministries, Inc. Phoenix Arizona.
Neighborhood Ministries is a faith non-profit committed to holistically resourcing kids, families and communities in order to break the cycle of poverty. On any given day, you can see a glimpse of this intentionality through one of our programs. People come from all over our city, or other cities to learn from us.

Maybe what gets under this question beyond what I have already said, has to do with some core convictions we live out:
1.) One of the best ways to collapse the cycle of poverty in the first generation is to commit to knowing people their whole lives and their kids and their kid’s kids. We are known for this … for following the same families, for knowing kids and resourcing them into their adulthood and then beginning with their children, sometimes even before birth. We are committed to long-term relationships.
2.) We believe that the best solution to community transformation lies inside the community itself. We intentionally develop leaders for the future of our community, our city, our state and the country. We want the future leaders to come from our neighborhood and we want to have been catalytic in seeing this leadership emerge to take ownership of the problems. We believe that the best solutions to our community’s problems are generated from within the community. We are called to leadership development.
3.) We follow Jesus’ example. The fact that God so loved the world that he entered into our reality allows us to follow him by standing with the poor and vulnerable on the ground in under-resourced communities, ministering with, not to or for, committed to an inside-out approach, not relying on an outside-in perspective. We live in the community we serve on purpose, as one of the residents.
4.) We are bridge builders. We recognize that we know people from all sides of the divide(s), so we are able to help people find their way back to one-another, building relationships toward reconciliation and peace, rich and poor, black, white and Hispanic, suburban and urban, Catholic and Protestant, young and old, Republican and Democrat. We are called to the work of reconciliation.
5.) We are not just service providers, we are also “moving upstream” tackling systemic issues that affect poverty, those things that keep people poor. We are advocates as well as community organizers. We train our community to speak for itself and to engage in systemic change. We are called to the work of justice.
6.) Committed to “entering into” our community, we continually discover what we don’t know and what we desire to learn. We are committed to remaining in a posture of learning, being among, not standing over, acknowledging change and transformation are a process and not often easily measured. We value learning.

Do you feel like there was something about the experiences you had growing up that played an outsized role in setting you up for success later in life?
A long story of my growing up life can be found in the first chapters of our book: http://www.nmphx.com/about/history/

Here is a synopsis: Both my childhood and my conversion to Christianity carry a dominant theme, that of “suffering.” I entered into my adult life knowing that my suffering was a door into the sufferings of others. I was coming in as a “beggar showing other beggars where the food is.” It is a metaphor of course, but my personal identification with my weaknesses has gained me access to this community. (Again, the book tells the long version of this part of my story.)

I accept my family of origin had strong parts too, gifts of entrepreneurship — both grandfathers were successful businessmen and community leaders. gifts of creativity and resourcefulness — mother and grandmother had artistic abilities and connections, gifts of stamina and determination — my parents were college graduates, upwardly mobile and driven. Though I come from white privilege, I have learned that “to those who are given much, much is required.”

Contact Info:

• Address: Neighborhood Ministries
  1918 W Van Buren St
  Phoenix, AZ 85009
• Website: www.nmaz.org
• Phone: 602-818-6733; 602-252-5225 (voice/fax/text)
• Email: kit.danley@nmaz.org; office@nmaz.org
• Facebook: facebook.com/nmphx
• Twitter: twitter.com/nmphx
• Other: youtube.com/nmphx

Image Credit:
Hope Through Art

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