Trouble-Making Earns Award, Not Rebukes

Bonita Grubbs got a surprise when she Googled herself. She discovered that she has ​“caused a lot of trouble.”

That may surprise people who know Bonita Grubbs, as well. And a lot of people know Bonita Grubbs.

Troublemakers get people mad. As executive director of Christian Community Action (CCA) for the past 24 years, Grubbs has been a leading voice for the poor in New Haven. Her efforts have put politicians on the spot. Hauled government into court. Generated calls for dramatic changes in health care. Helped bring ​“scattered-site” public housing to the East Shore — where someone responded in the early ​‘90s by torching a building.

You might call that causing trouble.

Yet no one gets mad at Bonita Grubbs. Instead they put her on boards of directors. They ask her advice. They pitch in to help homeless families get a place to live or food to eat. They give her awards.

Grubbs will get one such award at the Lawn Club Wednesday morning: Community Mediation’s 2012 Reverend Howard Nash Community Leadership Award for ​“promot[ing] social justice in greater New Haven.”

“Some folks are organizers of people. Some folks are organizers of ideas,” Grubbs said during an interview inside her busy office at CCA’s headquarters at Davenport Avenue and Asylum Street where, after having just returned from a business-dress United Way event, she prepared to deal with staffers and homeless families. As usual, she spoke in quiet, deliberate, thoughtful tones. ​“Some folks,” she said, ​“are go-betweens [between] the two.”

She put herself in that last category. The ​“dialogue” category.

To Grubbs, true dialogue doesn’t mean ducking uncomfortable questions. It does require hearing and knowing how to speak with people from different worlds, a trait she developed growing up in Hartford, then attending Smith College (graduating in 1977), earning divinity and public-health degrees from Yale, spending her days with families with no homes or food to put on the table. To Grubbs, true dialogue also requires nurturing new voices to speak up.

“Dialogue” Roots

The late Father Nash, the priest at Morris Cove’s St. Bernadette Church after whom Community Mediation named the award, made the kind of trouble Bonita Grubbs makes. He too had a knack for ending up in the middle of New Haven’s most vitriolic controversies and emerging respected and praised by all sides.

What Nash was known for, what Grubbs does so well, may more appropriately fall under the category of ​“promoting dialogue” — the mission of Community Mediation — rather than ​“making trouble.” When Nash’s neighborhood began burning down public housing, he gathered angry congregants in St. Bernadette’s. He told them he, too, opposed scattered-site housing in concept. But he also told them scattered-site was coming to Morris Cove nevertheless. (A judge’s ruling in a federal lawsuit, in which Grubbs’ CCA served as a co-plaintiff, required it.) Rather than burn down buildings, let’s work with our neighbors to make public-housing work well in our neighborhood, Nash urged. People aired their views. Then he joined him. Not only did the violence stop. The housing program succeeded; Nash became a believer.

When a pending New Haven-East Haven march over the police killing of Malik Jones raised fears of racial violence, Nash called angry people back to his church. White people and black people. He asked a fellow ​“dialogue”-friendly clergy person willing to confront tough issues to join him at the pulpit: Bonita Grubbs. She answered the call.

The very agency Grubbs runs grew from the seeds of dialogue. Riots in the Hill neighborhood convinced white religious suburbanites to launch ​“living room dialogues” about how to help the city. Those dialogues led to the creation of Christian Community Action.

Grubbs has brought that spirit to her work there, where she combines two often separate missions. The first mission: Helping people right now, by operating a food pantry and 18 emergency apartments for homeless families in the Hill as well as a transitional shelter backed with social programs on Winchester Avenue in Newhallville. Mission two: tackling the underlying ​“social justice” challenges that lead people to need that help. Like a lack of jobs or affordable housing or affordable health care.

Grubbs speaks at press conferences with groups like the Universal Health Care Foundation. She sits on the boards of the Hospital of St. Raphael, the Community Economic Development Fund, Sustinet, Connecticut Voices for Children, the Connecticut Housing Coalition, Project Access New Haven. In the past she has served as president of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness and as a member of the Judicial Review Council.

For examples of how she can connect with different kinds of groups, check out this video of a sermon Grubbs preached at Friendship Missionary Baptist, an African-American church in Highville …

… then this video of a very different Grubbs sermon at Yale’s Battell Chapel …

… and this interview she did with Connecticut’s House Democrats about health care.

Giving Voice To Others

Beyond her public speaking, Grubbs stays behind the scenes and encourages the people CCA serves to become their own spokespeople (often, spokeswomen). She does that through … dialogue.

Take the formation of Mothers for Justice. CCA was already working with single moms on welfare. Under Grubbs the agency organized meetings for them and other single moms to talk with each other about how to cope with challenges (difficult boyfriends, impenetrable bureaucracies). Next they talked to people who know the inner workings of government and social services agencies to learn more about the system. Then they told their stories directly to lawmakers, at rallies and at meetings, stories they hoped would influence decisions about how to structure welfare policy, for instance.

“Gee, your problem is like mine,” Grubbs remembered participants saying at those initial welfare-mom dialogues. ​“Maybe we need some help in solving problems together” and should ​“take it to another level.”

So why doesn’t anyone get mad at Grubbs, when she presses New Haven’s hottest buttons?

She doesn’t yell. She doesn’t make disputes personal. She doesn’t call attention to herself, seek attention. She respects people, no matter what their views.

“She has a knack,” observed Natasha Ray, a former Mothers for Justice member and staffer who now works for New Haven’s Healthy Start program. ​“She has an open mind. She wants to hear what people have to say. She’s always anxious to meet folks where they are. I think that’s what’s it is.

“Bonita was instrumental in making sure that the women knew that knowledge is power.”

State Sen. Toni Harp has observed Grubbs up close for more than two decades at public and private events involving contentious issues.

“She always takes a principled stand. It’s based upon principles that we all understand, which are rooted in her deep religious belief. It’s consistent,” Harp observed.

“She always comes armed with information. She doesn’t ever over-emotionalize an issue. She doesn’t ever use anger and frustration as a tool. It is authentic.”

For her part, Grubbs said she tries ​“to take people where they are. If you provide an opportunity for people — a safe space — they’re going to have to determine how to live.”

Grubbs said she has ​“always thought that God had given me a mission to work at transforming society and people.”

“Dialogue is part of that,” she said. ​“You can’t think about change unless you know what people are thinking, what people’s dreams and hopes are.” She said people need a ​“comfortable and safe space” to have that dialogue.

In her public life, Grubbs doesn’t seek headlines. She doesn’t gladhand. ​“I’m not trying to make friends. I’m tii much of an introvert to work a crowd,” she said.

“I hope in my interactions with people, people are left better off than how I found them,” Grubbs reflected, not because she did anything special, but ​“because the conversation went somewhere.” Because, in other words, she made some trouble.