Tears Are Washing Our Eyes That We May See, Teaching in San Antonio, TX, a “City of Compassion”
April 9, 2020, ten thousand hungry families lined up for help at the San Antonio, Texas, Food Bank. A few weeks into the pandemic confinement, the deep problems that the shining tourist areas of the city hides were revealed. Thousands of people have been living on the edge of food insecurity. Not only was the poverty revealed, national news spotlighted the tragedy. The pictures looked like a huge parking lot. Sadly, it was families lined up in their cars waiting for food.
San Antonio has the dubious distinction of the highest percentage of people living in poverty among the 25 largest U.S. cities and of being one of the most economically segregated cities with huge gaps in neighborhoods, education, job opportunities, housing and medical care availability. In “normal” San Antonio, the mortality rate for persons in the most disadvantaged ZIP codes is 20 years less than persons in the wealthiest ZIP code.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg has initiated weekly online gatherings with faith leaders since the pandemic began. On May 7, he said, ”We cannot accept going back to the way things were, back to ‘normal.’ We need to be better than that. When this pandemic began, the Food Bank lines doubled to 120,000 families per week. That means that normal in San Antonio was when 60,000 families depended on the Food Bank to put food on their tables. Normal was a booming economy with historic low 3% unemployment for months, but in which more than 15% of our community lived in poverty and nearly a quarter of all children. Normal was when 1 in 4 households didn’t have access to the internet to get homework assignments, order food, etc.”
In August, 2020, educators from seven San Antonio colleges and universities came together virtually for a workshop “Critical Thinking, Compassion, and Paths to Civic Engagement.” They explored teaching strategies so that students may recognize some of the realities in our city and be agents of transformation. This is part of a grant program “Pedagogies for Social Justice and Civic Engagement” funded by the Wabash Center and including year-long mentoring for a small group.
The grant stands with the city-wide effort to have compassion education for all levels and to truly live our title as a City of Compassion. Mayor Ron Nirenberg invited leaders to send educators to the San Antonio Compassionate Institute 2020, a five week series, Compassionate Integrity Training leading into year-long cohorts to spread seeds. This series led by Life University virtually brought facilitators from Canada, Columbia, England, India, Ireland, Kenya, and the U.S. to help San Antonio and over 160 educators benefited. They were from all colleges and universities and 85% of the school districts. In the spring of 2021 two other groups of people have been participating in CIT series coming from city government, business, and other areas with a strong group of people in education and research. Another group starts in the Summer of 2021 https://sacompassion.net/2021-compassion-institute/
In November, 2009, at the University of the Incarnate Word, Religious Studies students did a service learning project of gathering Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and Sikhs to discuss compassion in their tradition and watch online the inauguration of the “Charter for Compassion.” The San Antonio peaceCENTER and others kept promoting the charter movement seeking city-wide affirmation. Small seeds planted by young people can grow. In 2017 the City Council and Mayor Ron Nirenberg issued a Resolution that San Antonio be a City of Compassion. That means the city is listed among over 450 cities to be a model and seed more compassion in the world. The Charter movement also encourages “compassion for the earth.” The Compassion Tree Project is an aspect of that, regreening the earth to help the environment and all living creatures. San Antonio is growing “Compassion Trees” and educational institutions involved in compassion education are planting.
As the pandemic unmasks the disparity of the city, the growing compassion movement with its deliberate educational strategies in compassion training, has potential to contribute to the transformation of the inequalities of the beautiful city by the San Antonio River which started in 1718. As the pandemic unmasks the disparities in our world, compassion education can be transformative.
Adapted by Martha Ann Kirk, Th.D., University of the Incarnate Word, from the article with this title which she co-authored with Victoria Saldana, St. Mary’s University, which appeared in the Newsletter of the World Council of Curriculum and Instruction, Summer 2020 http://wcci-international.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Summer-2020-newsletter.pdf pp. 18–22.
