For generations, residents on San Antonio’s Southeast Side have grappled with robberies, shootings, and acts of violence in their neighborhoods and in front of institutions like St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church. After years of organizing, COPS/Metro celebrates a major victory - the groundbreaking of the new South Flores Police Substation to serve the Southeast Side community. This new facility will be the first police substation built in San Antonio in 30 years.

Despite the City of Austin's goal of having a park within a 10-minute walk of every resident, there’s a stark difference between the trails and outdoor space enjoyed by wealthy residents and the unmarked lots in under-resourced neighborhoods. This divide became tragically clear during the pandemic, when East and South Side residents faced higher COVID-19 death rates and lacked local outdoor infrastructure for safe social distancing and community building.

To tackle this persistent issue, Central Texas Interfaith (CTI) launched a city-wide listening campaign in 2022. This was part of the first national funding initiative in the U.S. dedicated to supporting community-based power-building to reverse green space inequities.

Credited by the San Antonio Express-News as "the loudest and most organized opposition" to a publicly-funded luxury arena on the ballot, COPS/Metro boosted voter turnout to historic levels and built leverage to negotiate project accountability and labor protections by holding the measure to a slim electoral margin.

In a recent Texas Public Radio discussion featuring prominent local reporters, journalists credited COPS/Metro with earning public trust and making a huge impact on the arena campaign—despite operating with a fraction of the resources available to pro-Prop B forces.

Texas Public Radio host and senior reporter David Martin Davies highlighted the scale of the financial mismatch:

“With very little money, they took on the Spurs… The Spurs spent well over $7 million for their star-studded saturation campaign, and they went toe-to-toe with them.”

Responding to pressure from The Metropolitan Organization (TMO), the City of Houston has issued demolition orders for two long-vacant buildings, one of which is a strip mall that has been abandoned for over 30 years.

In response to changes in immigration law enforcement and the upsurge in ICE detentions and deportations, Dallas Area Interfaith (DAI) is developing a legal representation strategy for people in detention.

Over a year after Hurricane Beryl and a derecho windstorm made thousands of homes uninhabitable, TMO (The Metropolitan Organization) leaders and allies persuaded the City of Houston to boost funding for home repair from zero to $100 Million, using federal disaster recovery dollars. 

The Metropolitan Organization (TMO) leaders and others in their communities have been detained and deported while at work, after dropping their children off at school, and upon calling the police for help after experiencing domestic violence. In response, TMO organized more than 15 'Know Your Rights' workshops across Houston with 1,500 community members.

In the closing weeks of the 2025 legislative session, over 100 Texas IAF leaders mobilized once again to stop a corporate tax giveaway that would have slashed wages and cost Texas schools hundreds of millions in lost revenue.

After nearly three years of organizing, EPISO-Border Interfaith leaders from Bauman Rd celebrated a major victory Wednesday: the City of Socorro revised its “Arterial 1” proposal, renouncing its initial plan to build a major road through the heart of their neighborhood. The move would have impacted over 100 families and displaced dozens of longtime residents—many elderly and living on fixed incomes—who had spent decades building their homes.

Pope Francis meeting with Rabbi Lyon. He and Bishop John Ogletree (photo below) are leaders with TMO and wrote this article.

[Originally published in Houston Chronicle]

Last year, Pope Francis met with a group of 15 or so Houston community organizers and leaders in his private residence. It was the third time he’d met with us, members of The Metropolitan Organization (TMO) of Houston and colleagues from the West/Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation. This time, he counseled us not to lose the ability to laugh.