Juanita Irizarry Resources

I first met CCDA and Noel Castellanos in the early 1990s.  A few years out of college, I was coordinating “urban plunge” experiences for Christian college students exploring urban and cross-cultural ministry through the Christian Center for Urban Studies of the Olive Branch Mission.  A pastor in Chicago’s La Villita neighborhood, Noel periodically hosted our student groups who were exploring the Mexican community.  I also recently had encountered the world of affordable housing and economic development and had run across the writings of John Perkins, Ray Bakke, Bob Lupton, Ron Sider, and others.  I had my big “aha” moment, as I call it, as these authors provided me words to articulate the stirrings in my soul.  And my continued exploration into Christian community development helped me find the professional field of urban planning and policy.  

The daughter of a Nuyorican father and a white woman who thinks she’s Puerto Rican, I was raised in the barrio where my parents were in full-time ministry through the pastorate and Christian schools.  We were taught through word and deed to care for our poor neighbors.  However, that was approached largely on an individual basis.  There was no one in my life who was talking about or addressing poverty on a systemic level.  But I had taken an early interest in the physical condition of my neighborhood as I watched numerous houses burn down and other buildings fall into disrepair.  Years later, as I read David Claerbaut’s Urban Ministry, I proclaimed, “He’s explaining my life!” as I learned about rampant arson fires in certain Chicago neighborhoods in the 70s and slumlords who had managed their buildings toward demolition as banks redlined those areas. 

My “aha” experience led me to my first CCDA conference in Baltimore in 1994 while I was pursuing a graduate degree in urban planning and policy.  Since then, the Lord has led me down a path of secular affordable housing, economic development, and public policy work through non-profits focused on Chicago’s Latino community.  Meanwhile, He has also used and equipped me through various churches: as part of the leadership team of an old, predominantly White, CCDA-member church that was trying to be relevant through wholistic ministry in a largely Latino community; for a time of rest at Lawndale Community Church; and, now, as a leader at La Casa del Carpintero, a nearly 5 year-old, bilingual, bi-cultural church plant in my life-long neighborhood of Humboldt Park.  (In fact it was Noel who introduced me to my pastor, Dr. Isaias Mercado, at the New Orleans CCDA conference.  And it was Pastor Phil Jackson who whispered in my ear one day after church at Lawndale: “It’s time for a certain Puerto Rican sister to go back to Humboldt Park and apply her gifts at a church in her own community.”) 

My most recent professional experience was at the helm of Latinos United, a non-profit housing advocacy organization which we transformed into a comprehensive public policy organization encompassing additional issues, starting with immigration and education.  A “sabbatical” year in the Mid-Career Master of Public Administration program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has left me refreshed, inspired, better equipped, and extremely excited to get back to “keeping it real” as I like to say, applying at ground-level all that I’ve gleaned thus far.  I look forward to sharing and learning, further building on and merging my secular community development and public policy experience and education with the theological underpinnings and models of practice available through my role as the new CCDA Institute Director as we all serve together for the glory and expansion of His kingdom.

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