How churchgoers can start a grassroots campaign

Key points:

• The United Women in Faith Assembly 2026 included a workshop that offered a blueprint for United Methodists getting involved in grassroots organizing.
• The session focused on how United Methodists worked on the housing crisis in Indiana.
• While a lack of housing is a nationwide problem, the workshop organizers felt that their experience offered lessons for addressing all kinds of issues.
• The Indiana United Methodists also hoped to help fellow churchgoers learn from their mistakes.

Want an example of how community organizing should work?

Look no further than the familiar children’s game around the nursery rhyme “The Farmer in the Dell,” said Sherrae Davis.

The longtime United Women in Faith leader recalled as a kid, relishing the ever-growing group of children at the center as their peers sang “the farmer takes a wife, the wife takes a child, the child takes a dog,” and on down the line.

“I loved it because of the concept of community building, particularly around advocating for a cause,” Davis said. She used the lesson of the game to successfully rally her classmates to get their teacher to award extra recess.

She recalled “The Farmer in the Dell” again when as vice president of the Indiana Conference’s United Women in Faith, she first heard about the housing crisis in the state.

Davis and fellow Indiana United Methodists discussed the advocacy work they did around housing in the workshop “Grassroots Advocacy: A Blueprint for Getting It Done” during the United Women in Faith Assembly 2026.

The goal of the workshop was not so much to get people involved in housing issues — although as Davis and others pointed out, a lack of affordable housing is a pervasive problem across the U.S. — but to help United Methodists get started in grassroots organizing for positive change in their communities. Workshop organizers also hoped to help those in attendance learn from their mistakes.

Step 1: Identify the call.

Among other teachings, The United Methodist Church’s biblically informed Social Principles state that “we believe that everyone has a right to decent living conditions, including adequate food and water, safe housing and a healthy environment.”

But there is no question that safe, affordable housing is in short supply across the state of Indiana.

Davis began the workshop with a variation of the game show “The Price Is Right,” asking three randomly selected contestants to guess the average rent for an 880-square-foot apartment in Indianapolis, the assembly’s host city.

The answer? The average rent for the small unit is $1,100 in Indianapolis, and ranges from $1,500 to $1,600 in most surrounding cities. What this means is that almost three-quarters of Indiana renters end up paying more than half of their pre-tax income toward housing each year, and that’s just the people who can manage to get into a rental unit in the first place.

Indiana is now tied with Illinois for the lowest rate of affordable housing in the U.S. Midwest. In Indiana, like other states, the cost of available housing and other basics is also outpacing income gains.

That disconnect is pushing people into homelessness nationwide.

Davis was the Indiana Conference’s United Women in Faith vice president when the conference’s then-episcopal leader, Bishop Julius C. Trimble, asked her and other UWF leaders to engage the housing issue.

Davis. a wife, mother and semi-retired engineer, immediately saw the resonance of Trimble’s request for the United Methodist women’s organization. United Women in Faith and its predecessors have long had the mission of supporting women, children and youth. Davis pointed out that working moms often struggle to be able to cover necessities like healthcare and food while also paying rent.

In Indiana, the largest share of homeless are families with children, and seniors.

Step 2: Find your community.

To truly answer the call for action, Davis knew she could not go it alone.

No matter how innovative your idea for mission is, she said, there likely already exists a community that will support it.

“It’s just a matter of finding your community, connecting with those folks who think as you do,” Davis said. “Consider also that as you are working your way towards them, they are very likely working their way towards you. It’s a two-way street.”

For Davis, that community was the United Women in Faith, which already has a long track record of advocating for public policy that aligns with church teachings.

She quickly got UWF members across Indiana on board with making housing the center of the state chapter’s programming for 2024 and 2025.

“Even our decorations had to do with the housing issue, so we had little boxes on our tables with little keys to houses,” Davis said. “Everything centered around housing. We couldn’t push hard enough on that issue.”

The group began working more closely with Family Promise, an interfaith nonprofit that organizes networks of congregations and other local groups to provide shelter, showers and a way forward for families facing homelessness.

UWF in Indiana also trained members to reach out to their legislators and help the women practice what they wanted to say.

“You want to scare your legislators; you come in force with numbers,” Davis said. “And United Women in Faith had that. ... We had the numbers; we had the enthusiasm; we just needed the facts.”

Step 3: Find external partners.

That’s where Prosperity Indiana came in. The nonpartisan nonprofit brings together individuals, organizations and businesses to strengthen economic development in Hoosier communities. Prosperity Indiana is also a state partner of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which works to mobilize members and educate lawmakers to support good housing policy.

Prosperity Indiana, Davis said, helped UWF members disseminate “facts that matter” — that is, the facts that move people to put faith in action.

Step 4: Use all avenues to communicate and educate.

Andrew Bradley, Prosperity Indiana’s senior director of policy and strategy, happens to be a United Methodist himself and son of a now-retired United Methodist pastor.

Even before the state’s United Women in Faith approached his nonprofit, Bradley told the workshop participants that he had heard from other United Methodists in recent years who were eager to address the housing issues they saw in their Communities.

Bradley said United Methodists — many of whom live in rural and suburban parts of the U.S. — can have significant sway with their state’s legislators, especially in Indiana.

“Another just plain fact on the ground is that policymaking power in Indiana is intentionally cracked out of the large metropolitan areas,” Bradley said. “And often it’s the small towns and rural areas that are where the committee chairs and the decision-makers live.”

While he can talk about housing data for hours, Bradley said the facts are much more likely to move legislators when paired with the experience of people of faith where those legislators live.

“I just want to emphasize that you have a lot of influence and potential power,” he said.

Step 5: Build advocacy around an initiative.

Even before United Women in Faith got involved, Prosperity Indiana had achieved some policy wins in the state. That included getting the then governor to create the state’s first emergency rental assistance program during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But starting in 2024, with the pandemic in the rearview, the group needed to turn its attention from striving for proactive changes to reduce homelessness to stopping an effort to criminalize homelessness.

Bradley noted that the Cicero Institute, a Texas-based think tank founded by billionaire tech entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, is pushing measures nationwide to make sleeping outdoors in parks or sidewalks a crime. The result of such bans is to push the costs of sheltering people to local jails and social services, which, Bradley said, typically ends up being more expensive than providing more housing.

With the help of United Women in Faith advocacy, efforts to impose such a camping ban failed in the Indiana legislature in both 2024 and 2025.

Step 6: Keep people engaged.

But this year, the legislature quickly passed a statewide ban on unauthorized camping before Prosperity Indiana and its United Methodist partners could mobilize opposition.

The problem is that after two years of success, the United Methodists had lost their focus on housing, said the Rev. Melissa Fisher, associate pastor at Aldersgate United Methodist Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

“This is something to consider,” she said. “We know you have a lot of issues out there, but when you take your eye off the ball and you start to fragment and move to those other things, you lose the ability to leverage the work that you had done before.”

What she and other advocates learned is that the best way that United Methodists could have capitalized on their previous work would have been to keep people regularly informed about what was happening in the state legislature. She added that advocacy leaders also should have provided an action plan to help individual United Methodists immediately respond when the homeless camping ban came up again.

Fisher continues to make safe housing a priority of her ministry. At this point, she is looking to help hold slumlords to account for maintaining their properties in Fort Wayne. She also is running for an Allen County Council seat with the goal of directly addressing local issues.

Bradley emphasized that not everyone needs to get involved in housing specifically or run for public office.

“What we’re saying is that here’s a way that you can work on the issues that are most important to your community,” he said. “It could be nutrition assistance. It could be issues with utilities or childcare.”

Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.