Neighbor for Neighbor

[RecycleMichael]

My mother just wrote a book about a Tulsa hero who started a non-profit interfaith corporation named Neighbor for Neighbor. Dan Allen and this group was the starting point for many wonderful Tulsa things like the Tulsa Community Food Bank, The Safe House, micro banks, free medical and dental clinics and the North Tulsa Youth Baseball League.

Here is a story in today's Tulsa World about the group and the new center...

http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20120219_11_A22_CUTLIN430606

It will be named for Dan Allen, who started Neighbor for Neighbor.

By MIKE AVERILL World Staff Writer
Published: 2/19/2012 

A new area nonprofit is hoping to raise awareness of social justice while following in the path set forth by its namesake. The Dan Allen Center for Social Justice, named after the late priest and founder of Neighbor for Neighbor, is a "virtual" organization of community volunteers determined to carry on Allen's advocacy for the poor. "Dan was big on bringing people together and getting them to understand the problems of the poor," said Carol Falletti, the center's vice president, adding that he believed in "unconditional positive regard for all."

The idea for the center was born around Falletti's kitchen table as she and the other members discussed Allen and his compassion. "We had discussions about what social justice means in our lives and in our children's lives," she said. "We came to the idea that perhaps we should form the center and get back into advocacy and education." The organization's first effort was helping publish a book about Allen's life written by one of its advisory board members, Ann Patton.

In the future, the plan is to develop educational programs, as well as community forums and projects involving the poor, Falletti said. "We want to present programs to people, regardless of their thoughts on immigration and health care, where they can hear the facts and make up their own minds," she said. "There are a lot of experts here in Tulsa. It should be fairly easy to tap into that and provide the opportunity to give clear facts."

Falletti was one of the first parishioners at Father Bill Skeehan's church. Skeehan, president of the new center, was very close friends with Allen and challenged his parish to "get off their chairs and do something for the poor," Falletti said. "Dan and Bill had a poverty workshop. I heard them speak about how we should travel across the town and see how poor people were living and how we could help," she said.

Spurred by that inspiration, Falletti founded the free clinic at Neighbor for Neighbor, which had 300 to 350 volunteers. "At the time, there was no other place to go at no cost and a lot of people didn't have health care," Falletti said. Members of the organization also hope to create a reunion of sorts for the people who worked with and supported Allen. "I think working with Dan in that area is life changing for many people," Patton said. "There's power in community. Pulling these people together again could have a great effect on the cause of social justice."

The center also held a community forum last October and has plans for additional future forums. "We're one more voice in the chorus of people speaking on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden and on behalf of social justice and the common good," Patton said.

Here is a link to Neighbor for Neighbor...
http://neighborforneighbor.org/index.php

Here is a link to the new Dan Allen Center
http://danallencenter.org/

Here is a link where you can buy my mother's book...
http://www.wix.com/annpatton/annpatton

[Jammie]

Michael, not only do Dan Allen's works look impressive, you also have a very impressive Mother!

[shadows]

I had friend who wrote a book.  He was able to get it published.  The publisher sent the transcript to the proof reader, ($500 dollars) then to a person to make the correction in the story ($500) publisher printed a box full of the books ($2500) plus delivery cost.  “Here is your books distribute them and we will print some more for you”.  Publishing is a billion dollar business.  One should have an agent to distribute the books 

Publisher Clearing House biked citizens out of millions of dollars by using the word “Publisher”.   Late wife contributed thousands of dollars.

Tell you mother good luck in getting her transcript distributed. 

[RecycleMichael]

I appreciate your comments.

The publishing and selling is different now. The internets are awesome.

[GG]

Back in the day.............. 1963 or so, I was the token Protestant at the Boy Scout Troop out of St Judes on 46th Street N.  I joined with my neighbor Larry Leach who attended St. Judes.   Larry quit shortly there after but I stayed on for a couple of years.  

I think Dan Allen was the Priest there at that time.  

My big memory from the church/Boy Scout days was the oral polio vaccine.    I remember putting sugar cubes in little cups so the vaccine would be applied to the sugar cubes.   I remember making sandwiches for everyone coming to the church to take the vaccine.  

My baseball team also practiced and played ball games at a baseball back stop on the church site.  

Seeing this brings back good memories of St. Judes Catholic Church where Neighbor for Neighbor was started.  That church was a good influence on me at that point in my life in North Tulsa.  (I attended Alcott, Gilcrease and McLain growing up.)

[RecycleMichael]

Here is a nice review in the Urban Tulsa Weekly.

http://www.urbantulsa.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A48465

New book details Tulsa in the '60s, a crusading priest and the patchwork quilt of community that holds us together
BY JENNIE LLOYD

She met Dan Allen, the sharp-tongued "grassroots saint" who started Neighbor for Neighbor (NFN), the day before Thanksgiving in the early 1970s. Ann Patton was a reporter for the Tulsa World, looking for a feel-good holiday story. She sat down on a couch in Allen's office. In the middle of the interview, an old man came in, told Patton to please stand up, nodded toward the couch and said to Allen, "We need it, Dan." A family had come in to NFN after a house fire. In short order, the couch was hauled off, and Patton did the rest of the interview standing up.

Now, nearly four decades later, Patton has finished a biography of the crusading and fearless priest who was the force behind NFN, a popular Tulsa social service program. The book is Dan's War on Poverty: A Grassroots Crusade for Social Justice.

Clear, Fixed and Fierce

Father Allen was an icon whose campaign against poverty created buzz amid the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. He had a unique understanding of poverty, from the inside, out. The seventh of eight children born in the cradle of the Dust Bowl, into the bottom of the Great Depression, Allen grew up clear-eyed and focused. He was steeped in the Catholic faith, an altar boy, graduated from Marquette Catholic School. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest at Our Lady's Cathedral in Oklahoma City on May 25, 1957.

Patton described his official portrait as that of a "spiritual, dark-eyed young priest staring toward some distant truth," with only a "hint of a smile." Allen became involved in the civil rights crusades of the early 1960s. He sent a flurry of postcards to people back home, to tell them about what he was seeing on his road trips around the country. Allen and a few of his friends pulled all-nighters in cramped cars to see Martin Luther King Jr. speak. They were changed by what they heard.

By 1967, he became part of a team of four local churches -- two white, two black -- whose goal was to bring these four parishes together to address poverty, social injustice and racial tensions. The Neighbor for Neighbor program rose out of their efforts.

At the time, the program was untested, trailblazing. In Patton's poetic prose, she described those early NFN days: "With Neighbor for Neighbor, everything was experimental and unconventional, as precarious as the lives of the poor, salvaged from chaos only by a mesmerizing vision and relentless dark humor. The management was jazz-band at best; the methods were fluid; but the mission was clear, fixed and fierce. Rising from the serendipity and untidiness of it all, what evolved, then, was a series of bold, clean, elegant swipes at poverty and injustice."

Now, nearly four decades later, Patton has finished a biography of the crusading and fearless priest who was the force behind NFN, a popular Tulsa social service program. The book is Dan's War on Poverty: A Grassroots Crusade for Social Justice.

Clear, Fixed and Fierce

Father Allen was an icon whose campaign against poverty created buzz amid the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. He had a unique understanding of poverty, from the inside, out.

The seventh of eight children born in the cradle of the Dust Bowl, into the bottom of the Great Depression, Allen grew up clear-eyed and focused. He was steeped in the Catholic faith, an altar boy, graduated from Marquette Catholic School. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest at Our Lady's Cathedral in Oklahoma City on May 25, 1957.

Patton described his official portrait as that of a "spiritual, dark-eyed young priest staring toward some distant truth," with only a "hint of a smile." Allen became involved in the civil rights crusades of the early 1960s. He sent a flurry of postcards to people back home, to tell them about what he was seeing on his road trips around the country. Allen and a few of his friends pulled all-nighters in cramped cars to see Martin Luther King Jr. speak. They were changed by what they heard.

By 1967, he became part of a team of four local churches -- two white, two black -- whose goal was to bring these four parishes together to address poverty, social injustice and racial tensions. The Neighbor for Neighbor program rose out of their efforts.

At the time, the program was untested, trailblazing. In Patton's poetic prose, she described those early NFN days: "With Neighbor for Neighbor, everything was experimental and unconventional, as precarious as the lives of the poor, salvaged from chaos only by a mesmerizing vision and relentless dark humor. ... The management was jazz-band at best; the methods were fluid; but the mission was clear, fixed and fierce. Rising from the serendipity and untidiness of it all, what evolved, then, was a series of bold, clean, elegant swipes at poverty and injustice."

The idea behind NFN, Patton said, was that "if you are poor and come to Neighbor for Neighbor, you get help. No questions asked. So you would get whatever they had. You needed Dan's desk, he gave you his desk. "But in return," she said, "you were expected then to help others. In that process, you gained self-respect because you weren't just taking a hand-out. You were a functioning part of society." Dan explained it this way: "From the beginning, the idea was not to simply run a charity, but to integrate charity and justice into one. If you separate them, you end up with paternalism or legalism."

In addition to feeding the poor and giving away his and the program's meager belongings, he "attacked poverty from many different angles," Patton said. NFN, which still operates today in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, offers medical and dental clinics, legal help and other family assistance in addition to food and goods. The key difference between NFN in those early days and other charities was that Allen was determined to give back everything that came in -- food, money, couches, whatever.

"Dan Allen worked at the grassroots level. He hated bureaucracy," Patton said. NFN was "born at a kitchen table, managed around kitchen tables, and is a story of how really ordinary people did extraordinary things because they worked together with such passion on behalf of what I would call the common good."

Tiny Invisible Stitches

She was inspired by the way Allen and NFN's volunteers viewed their community. "They worked together to do what would seem to be impossible things," Patton said. Small-scale activism, she said, has power. Father Allen died in 1995, but a small group of Tulsans want to keep his memory and his legacy and his passion alive. And they created the Dan Allen Center for Social Justice, a new 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to fostering social justice through education.

The center's board president is Father Bill Skeehan, a retired Catholic priest and longtime friend of Allen. Vice president Carol Falletti created and led Allen's free medical clinic. Board members include Mike Calnan, Dana Falletti, Tom Long, Lorraine Lowe, and Linda Nicholson. Their first goal was raising the money to commission Allen's biography. And on that same cooperative grassroots level, they've done it.

One friend designed the cover, another guy did the index for free, the designer worked for pennies. "It is possible to write a book, publish it for almost no money and sell it yourself," Patton said. Now they're figuring out how to sell it. Right now, Patton is selling it out of the back of her car and purse, but it's also available online at annpatton.net. Also look for copies at Steve's Sundries, Ida Red Boutique, and Peace of Mind bookstore.

Throughout this process, Patton has realized the power of community and reached a greater understanding of what holds people together. After she left her reporting days behind, Patton worked for the city of Tulsa and developed expertise in disaster work.

Since retiring from the city in 2004, she said she's "worked most of the big hurricanes," like Hurricane Katrina and Ike. She compares a community to a patchwork quilt -- the kind her Aunt Mae used to make. Family and friends would give her aunt their scraps, and she'd use them to hand-stitch quilts. "She never bought a sewing machine," Patton said. "And she would make these tiny invisible stitches, create these gorgeous quilts and give them away to the poor.

"I've come to think that's what a community is. We all take our bits and pieces and bring them together," she said. "And then it's all held together by these tiny invisible stitches -- people caring about each other, people helping each other. What Dan called neighbor for neighbor. That's what this community is."

For more on the Dan Allen Center for Social Justice, check out danallencenter.org.

[heironymouspasparagus]

He was a wonderful man - truly a great man in every possible sense of the word.

Some friends and I did volunteer work there on Saturday's from time to time (late '60's).  He (the church?) had an old delivery van we drove around to local bread places and grocery stores to pick up 'day-old' bread and canned goods.  With that truck, it was always a crap-shoot whether we would make it back or not.