As part of our multiyear campaign titled “What’s Working,” sponsored in part by Lilly Endowment Inc., we’re talking with faith-based organizations across the country to discover how they’re working to engage Gen Z. Together Lab works to unite Pacific Northwest-based congregations, denominations, and justice movements to create initiatives and partnerships that meet emerging needs.  Read below for excerpts from our conversation with Co-director Ron Werner and Director of Youth Initiatives Chris Dela Cruz or watch the entire recording on YouTube. 

Hannah Evans: What does Together Lab do? 

Ron Werner: Together Lab works around the state of Oregon and [the] Pacific Northwest in a space where many of our institutions, religious institutions, and government institutions are very fragile. We seek to build community power in order to change the systems that exploit people and the planet. We do that in really three main ways. First, we do it through community organizing and building relationships in order to change systems. We have a base of people around the state who work and walk alongside one another to do justice work in the world. Second, we help incubate and start new initiatives, recognizing that some of the ways we’ve done things forever are no longer working—and so we have to experiment a little bit. We need a lab to learn and unlearn and practice some new methodologies. And third, we host collaborative partnerships, often with denominations, social movement organizations, or nonprofits that work toward a common goal or common purpose. But in all of that, we really want to create communities where all belong, so we use community organizing, starting new initiatives, and collaborative partnerships as a way to do that. 

Hannah Evans: Giving young people a sense of purpose and ownership is a huge part of what you do with young people, so I’m curious: What has it looked like for you to cultivate purpose for young people in your organizing work? 

Chris Dela Cruz: In organizing, what we’re doing is inviting these young folks into leadership, into sensing that they have a sense of agency. [This is a] part of a marker of real structural belonging—that they have this sense of agency in the larger structures, and they have a say and they belong. The tension that we constantly try to tend to is the fact that young folks are “in their becoming.” They are also juggling so much in school and in just learning about some of these pressures and structures for the first time. I’ll never forget at one of our listening sessions with young folks, one of our high schoolers said, “You know, we feel like we’ve learned about this climate crisis, and we feel like the adults in our lives created it and now have lumped it to our generation to try to save it.” And what we don’t want to say to our young folks is that the weight of the whole world is just on [their] shoulders. I think that’s a really key component in the solidarity, multigenerational aspect to [this work]. At the same time, young folks want to be invited to make some sort of difference in that. And so to be invited into something greater than themselves is that sense of purpose, which again, I think what [Springtide’s] research has laid out so well is that there is room for that purpose once they have that sense of belonging, once they have those connections. 

Watch the full conversation with Together Lab on our You Tube channel.