Natalia naranjo: cultivating community in Norristown, Pennsylvania
“Community has always meant showing up for each other, whether it was showing up for people after a house fire and needed help paying bills afterwards”
Natalia Naranjo hails from Norristown, Pennsylvania in Councilmember Rashaad Bate’s District.
While working on staff as a community organizer for POWER Interfaith, Natalia works to bridge the gap between congregation members and local civic engagement. She credits her mother’s influence on her upbringing for being so community oriented as well as her childhood faith leader, Padre Gus, who taught her the importance of people-power. This early inspiration would serve as a moral compass for the work she would enter into as an adult, as she organizes in the realm of education justice.
Issues within Pennsylvania’s education system have been ever-persistent since Natalia was in the Norristown School System and Pennsylvania as whole, as recent finding found the state liable from withholding over 3 billion dollars in funding from Pennsylvania public schools. With this in mind, she organizes across her hometown bringing parents, local congregants and social justice advocates together.
“What I’ve found within my own education growing up in Norristown is that the schools aren’t being invested in. Not only do students lack necessary resources, but not also struggle from not having educators and administrators to support them in the best way they could. Whether it’s for a lack of funding or a lack of resources we are all struggling in Norristown.”
Her organizing efforts are built on cultivating not only relationships, but fostering community. Through the breaking of silos, she believes community is the path forward to seeing change in her community. “If people want to get into organizing or get into creating change in their community, it’s about finding people who also see that. Finding people struggling with the same thing and want to create change around that, or just willing to create change and difference for each other.
Her mission and sentiments echo, a true people-powered movement, involving courage, faith, action, and creating “a bigger we.”
