Bahá’ís are building relationships in Santa Monica and Los Angeles, California, both as individuals and as institutions of the Faith. A close look at those initiatives would reveal Tim Conley either right in the middle of the action or observing from the front row.
Conley has a foot in both cities: He serves as the director of Media and Communications in the Office of Religious Life at the University of Southern California in L.A. and teaches communications and media studies at Santa Monica College. He’s also a former Santa Monica resident.
So the Los Angeles Bahá’í can say with confidence that each community is committed to applying the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh in “service to our fellow man” in a multitude of settings ranging from a November 2017 forum on community policing to the day-to-day work of community building in neighborhoods.
Building understanding on policing
The Nov. 19 forum at the Santa Monica Bahá’í Center is a prime example of that commitment to building relationships within the community and forging discussions between institutions and with communities. Such efforts are helping to raise consciousness and address issues of race through local action.
The forum was one of a series involving police officers and other community members and featured a screening of the documentary film Walking While Black: L.O.V.E. is the Answer. The film reflects producer/director A.J. Ali’s interactions with police in Howard County, Maryland.
Ali took part in the panel alongside Conley, Santa Monica College Police Chief Johnnie Adams, Pico neighborhood resident Irma Carranza, and the film’s co-producer, Errol Webber, and associate producer, Mark Adams.
Conley, who is African American, as is Ali, was eager to join the discussion after meetings he’d had with former Santa Monica Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks about the department’s steps to create a relationship “with those who were doing everything from grassroots organizing to working in different fields around bringing community and police together.”
These encounters informed media courses, funded by a grant, that Conley was teaching to high school students. “I thought it would be a good idea for them to be exposed to what police really are compared to what we see sometimes portrayed in the media,” he explains. “And I thought that this police department was doing it the right way for the most part.”
When Seabrooks invited Conley to community roundtables on police and the community, he jumped at the chance. And at those showings of the film at and around the Santa Monica College campus, he met Ali.
From there the Santa Monica Bahá’í community saw an opportunity to expand the conversation in association with the Santa Monica Bay Area Human Relations Commission, on which Conley and two other Bahá’ís serve.
“Really learn from one another”
The big picture, says Conley, is that such forums open a door “for folks to have these conversations and to really learn from one another. And I believe, from my perspective, that’s how we all grow. We grow by having the conversations and working toward solutions rather than just looking at all the problems.”
And his impression is that attendees leave these conversations “feeling better. Some people might not be feeling good, but at least feeling better because the conversation has started. These forums open a venue up for people to have these conversations in a way they probably ordinarily wouldn’t have.
“So these forums are good,” says Conley. “They allow the police officers to gain even more perspective on how folks are feeling, and allow folks to understand that these police officers are human beings, too, and though they have on uniforms there are a lot of layers to that, and they’re getting a firsthand perspective on that.
“It doesn’t excuse some of the behaviors that happen and challenging things that have happened,” he notes, “but it gives perspective on just what [police] go through as well.”
Ali has built a movement called L.O.V.E. is the Answer around the film. (The initials stand for “Learn about your community and the people within it, Open your heart to the humanity in the community, Volunteer yourself to be part of the solution, and Empower others to do the same.”)
In addition to opening spaces for police-community interaction, the campaign encourages young people to create five-minute videos in which they engage police officers in dialogue. “This generation is a content generation,” observes Conley. “They all know how to work video on their cell phones.”
Conversations with impact
The human rights council also is expanding the conversation into such critical topics in the L.A. area as immigration and homelessness.
It’s in that environment that the Santa Monica and other area Bahá’í communities have been exploring what steps can be taken in light of Bahá’í teachings and arising from community-building efforts at the neighborhood level.
The Santa Monica Center has hosted talks in conjunction with its Sunday devotional gatherings. Conley is seeing movement as well in L.A. as a member of that community’s Area Teaching Committee.
“My focus is on devotionals, which now are opening wonderful spaces for folks from a myriad backgrounds to pray and meditate and try to create a space of unity that opens up for the other activities that could take place within a community,” he says.
From his perch at USC, Conley also sees the impact the junior youth spiritual empowerment program is having in the King Estates neighborhood of South Central L.A. and how college students have opened an environment for junior youths and their parents to spend time on campus.
The latter is something he says benefited him personally as a teen “because it got me thinking about going to college, especially in an environment where socio-economically it’s not always looked at as an option.”
Now Conley is on the other side of the equation, “just trying to bring some support from an academic perspective into the conversation.” As well as learning to bring a Bahá’í perspective to the table, alongside fellow believers in the L.A. area.