ONE L.A. Ministry Group

"Never do for others what they can for for themselves."
That is the "Iron Rule" of ONE L.A.

ONE L.A. - IAF is a broad-based organization of churches, schools, congregations and community groups throughout Los Angeles County and the L.A. metropolitan areas of Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside and Orange Counties. It is affiliated with the international organizing network, the Industrial Areas Foundation that has been working on organizing people to address their collective problems since 1941. ONE L.A. consists of over ninety congregations and thirty other organizations. La Verne Heights Presbyterian Church has been a member of ONE L.A. since its founding in 2004, and predecessor organizations since 2001.

The primary purpose of ONE L.A. is to enable its member organizations to effectively deal with the issues that assault their people, as they seek to be a force for good in the twenty first century. ONE L.A. member institutions work together to improve the quality of life for families, congregations and communities in southern California. It accomplishes this by building relationships between its institutions and their people, by acting together on commonly identified issues that affect our families and communities, and by building leaders.

ONE L.A. organizes its work at three levels: in the local member institutions, in geographical clusters of contiguous member institutions and throughout the entirety of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. La Verne Heights Presbyterian Church is a part of the Pomona Valley Cluster, which consists of member churches and organizations in the cities of Pomona, Claremont, Ontario, Montclair, Diamond Bar, Upland and La Verne.

The La Verne Heights ONE L.A. Ministry Group is the means by which our church works with ONE L.A. Our ministry group seeks to organize our congregation to identify issues that most affect our daily lives and then do something about them. The ONE L.A. Ministry Group is committed to strengthening our congregation's capacity to live out the Iron Rule in La Verne, throughout the Pomona Valley and in metropolitan Los Angeles! We do that in six ways:

1. We identify those in our congregation who have an appetite to work together to address neighborhood, community, regional and/or countywide issues, and work with them;
2. We build the capacity, ability and willingness of our people to address these issues;
3. We represent before the Pomona Valley Cluster of ONE L.A. our church's issues;
4. We engage other churches in La Verne in addressing those issues;
5. We support other churches and institutions in the Pomona Valley Cluster in addressing their issues;
6. We support the countywide organizing of ONE L.A., particularly in supporting other clusters to address issues similar to our own.

The ONE L.A. Ministry Group presently meets every other month, working in alternate months with other ONE L.A. groups. Please come and join us in working for justice in your town, your Pomona Valley and throughout Los Angeles.