Sister Pearl Ceasar has a remarkable journey from classroom teacher to nonpartisan community organizer. Guided by her deep faith and commitment to justice, Sister Pearl spent decades building coalitions for change in San Antonio and across Texas. She explains how personal relationships, listening, and persistence can transform neighborhoods—and entire cities. Co-hosts Marcus Goodyear and Camille Hall-Ortega join Sister Pearl to reflect on faith, leadership, and the power of binding communities together for the common good.
Production Team:
Written and produced by Marcus Goodyear, Camille Hall-Ortega, and Rob Stennett
Hosted by Marcus Goodyear and Camille Hall-Ortega
Edited by Rob Stennett and Kim Stone
Executive Producers: Patton Dodd and David Rogers
Graphic Design Manager: Hilary Commer
Junior Designer: Lindsay Bruce
Content Creator: Alyson Amestoy
Staff Writer: Beth Avila
Funded by the H. E. Butt Foundation
Special thanks to our guest Sister Pearl Ceasar.
Marcus: What comes to mind when you hear that someone is a community organizer? You might imagine political rallies or marches or protests or people standing with signs in front of the city hall. I doubt you would imagine a non-partisan nun in her eighties. I doubt you would imagine Sister Pearl Caesar. She’s the former Superior General of the Sisters of Divine Providence in San Antonio.
“That means I was the head nun,” she said at the H. E. Butt Foundation’s presidential luncheon in 2024. And being a head nun is a lot more than cloistered prayer. Sister Pearl is active. She started off as a schoolteacher in the 1960s, and she was very disturbed by the unequal opportunities that were presented to students.
In one instance, her school district’s board took money raised for new books by the black school in which she taught and gave it to the white school. The white school then bought new textbooks, and the black school received the white school’s 8-year-old textbooks. And Sister Pearl learned that life is not fair.
She also knew that problems like these don’t go away on their own. Being a nun had to mean more than teaching school and saying prayers, and she wondered how can society change? How can everyone have a fair shot? Those questions led her to become a non-partisan community organizer for the next 40 years.
In San Antonio, she gathered people of faith into a coalition called Communities Organized for Public Service, or COPS for short. The parish leaders organized for better schools, quality housing, accessible healthcare, safe neighborhoods, living wages, and adequate drainage.
I’m Marcus Goodyear from the H. E. Butt Foundation. This is The Echoes Podcast. On today’s episode, we welcome our guest sister Pearl Caesar. Sister Pearl understands what it looks like when a community works hard. And more than that, she understands how to organize communities, inspire leaders, and empower them to create institutions that work. Today we’re talking about community organizing.
I’m here with my co-host, Camille Hall Ortega.
Camille: Hi Marcus. How’s it going?
It’s good.
Sister Pearl: Welcome and hello, Marcus and Camille.
Marcus: Yes, yes. Thank you. Welcome. We’re so glad you’re here. Sister Pearl, I’ve just shared some of your story and I’d love to hear it in your own words. Starting at the beginning with your early work in education, could you talk about your first two teaching jobs?
Sister Pearl: Yes, thank you. In 1965, I was assigned to a white middle-class school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had 41st graders in my class, which I thought was gonna be rough, but at least half of those children came to school reading because they had an incredibly good foundation from their kindergarten, from their preschool, from their families.
Then I was assigned to an all-black public school in Louisiana, and I taught there two years while I got there. And the other sister and me were the only two white teachers in the school. And the reason that the public schools wanted to hire us as teachers is the public schools countywide were integrating.
This school was integrating, and they were concerned they were going to have some issues, and they thought if they had two sisters there, it would help and ease the transition into integration.
Marcus: They were a little late, right?
Sister Pearl: Yes, very late. But it was a rural area, and I think that accounted for it. So I learned I was going to have first and second grade. I had 25 children in first and second grade. So I thought this is gonna be a cakewalk. I mean, going from 40 to 25, that’s substantial, especially in a primary grade.
So I get there the first day I. And I learned as I meet the children, that I had three boys and I would say their name, but I don’t think I wanna do this publicly. All three were 12 years old and in second grade, and all three of them could not read. I mean, could not read a word because they were all children of the plantation workers.
They lived in the fields and when it rained, the school buses couldn’t get to their homes, so they would miss school. They didn’t have a way to get to school, and that’s why they were 12 years old in second grade and not reading well. The three boys and I struggled all year in terms of learning to read.
By the end of the year, they were reading. I was determined they were gonna read. I think just, you know, someone having that kind of interest in them motivated them to learn to read, but I was just literally bothered all year remembering and comparing the students I had in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where it was never considered that anyone would repeat first grade, nor did I have to send anyone back to kindergarten. And the injustice between that group and the African American group that I had in Louisiana. I thought their lives are gonna be so difficult. It’s not just a question of completing elementary school, high school. It’s the rest of their life that they’re gonna struggle.
Camille: You’re speaking of course, just from your personal experience with your class. Did you see the same problems throughout the school and in other schools in that community?
Sister Pearl: Absolutely because the other sister taught sixth grade, and she had, I will say, more issues than I did with the sixth graders. And then so many of the elementary, those who graduated from eighth grade never went to high school. They just went to work in the fields with their parents, and it was at that school in the second year.
The principal, he was an outstanding man and he, I mean, he tried his best. All the teachers were great, and they all tried their best, but it was the, the outside circumstances working against us. So he came to us, and he said, “Our textbooks, especially for the upper grades were out of date.” They were 10-year-old textbooks because they always got the old textbooks from the white schools.
And he said to us, “Will you work with me to raise money to buy new textbooks, especially for the upper grades?” And we said yes. So the way we did it, and we all agreed to do it, was we would save money in the cafeteria. That would be one of the major ways. We ate, literally ate rice and beans the whole year.
That’s how we saved money. I did not know there were that many variations of beans. I mean, we ate black beans, lima beans, red beans, green beans, every kind of being there was. The whole year. That’s how we saved our money to buy the new books.
Well, it got to the end of the year, and we had our money. We were ready to buy the new books, and he came back to us, and he said, “We’re not getting new books.” And as teachers, we were shocked. We said, Why? What happened?
He said, “Well, I talked to the superintendent, told him we had raised this money to buy our new books. He talked to the school board. The school board said, no, we’re not doing that. We are buying new books for the white school.” You know, one of the white schools. So we got 8-year-old old books after eating rice and beans all year. And the white schools got the new books that just sealed it for me.
I thought this is not a fair system. I could stay there the rest of my life, and I would not be able to change anything. I understood that I was only what, 25, 26, but I understood I would not be able to change anything. Because it wasn’t just the system, it was the fact that I never met a parent.
Not because of them. It was just the way it was set up. I never met a parent. I didn’t know where they lived, how to contact them, anything like that, because they were out in these fields.
I’d like to stay there and teach, but I thought, no, I could stay there again for the rest of my life and nothing would change. So I left.
Camille: You are seeing this injustice. It clearly burdened your heart. You tried to help with it and. It brought about more injustice for you to see. For a lot of people, they would be deeply discouraged by that. Right. But as we heard in our introduction. It really did spur you on. Marcus, I’m curious because you too, were a teacher in a public school. Did you have any experiences where you thought, oh, this isn’t right. What am I gonna do about this?
Marcus: Yes, for sure I did. For sure I did. I learned later that I had been teaching in a very privileged school. In fact, towards the later part of my career, I began to really believe students needed to hear from writers and authors directly. They were experiencing art on the page, and they weren’t experiencing it in community with the creators. And so I started partnering with Gemini Inc. out of San Antonio to bring the poets that would come to Gemini Inc. for special events to our classroom. So we would raise money with like sausage sales and stuff, and then we would donate that money to Gemini Inc.
And they would pass along a little bit to the artist, and the artist would come and do like a little one-hour workshop. We would bring people from the community. We did that a couple times, and then I realized that what I was essentially doing was, was pouring enrichment into the wealthiest community, which you, you wanna enrich everybody that you can.
But I began to shift my thinking to say, how can I reach beyond this community with the community? And so we started then sending those poets and writers to the Krier Juvenile Treatment Center in South San Antonio. And then our students would take a bus and go through security, you know, full body search, and then we would have a writing workshop alongside the, the students in juvenile detention. And even that was far from perfect because there was this really uncomfortable power dynamic that we brought in. It felt like we were tourists into their trauma in some ways, and yet at the same time, it was a way to try to share beyond our own privilege.
Sister Pearl, you somehow went from this feeling of powerlessness to community organizing and activism? I would just wanna hear you talk about that. What does it mean to be spurred on to that bigger vision? And how did you land on community activism or, or community organizing?
Sister Pearl: Well, I went to social work school thinking if I became a social worker, and they had a community organizing track in social work.
And I was so naive, but I thought if I take that then I can do community organizing. But in the second year of social work school, I learned of a national sisters lobbying group called Network in Washington DC, and I did my placement there, and I thought community organizing isn’t the way. This is the way, you know, work at the national level. We were able to get some laws changed. They were fairly effective, but what happened there was, I thought I am so separated from the local community. We are literally doing for people, and we’re bringing about the change we think they need, but we had no relationship to the poorer communities.
And I say this quite seriously as God would have it. I got very ill there and had to come back to San Antonio because of the illness and was not able to return to Washington, which was truly a grace from God.
When I got back here, the sisters were talking about COPS. Communities Organized for Public Service. COPS was two years old. It formed in 74 and I got here in 76.
Camille: What I’m realizing is that we’re talking about community organizing, but for some people, they don’t know what community organizing means, or maybe they think they do, and they might have a different idea of what it means than perhaps how we’re talking about it today. Can you help us define what community organizing is?
Sister Pearl: Sure. I’d be happy to. I organize, and this is the long story, not the short story, please. That’s what we’re looking for here. I organized with a group called the Industrial Areas Foundation. That group was formed by Solinsky. Who is the community organizer that’s probably most well done in the United States, but he started community organizing as we know it today in Chicago. But the way he did it was he knew it needed to be institutionally based, meaning out of churches, schools, labor union.
And so he brought those groups together, and that’s what we do. We bring groups together, not just individuals, because his insight was the issues our country face are so large [that] we need groups involved for the long term. It’s not gonna work with individuals involved who will come and go. Problems are too big for that.
Now, the first thing you have to do are individual meetings. First, get to know them a little bit about their background, and then talk to them. What do you see as the major needs in this area? One of ’em was a man named Pedro Guerro and he lived on Potto C Street. So I said to Mr. Guerro, what do you see as the major needs in this area?
He said, drainage, we don’t have any drainage system here. And he said, so when it rains hard, our houses flood. He said my neighbor drowned in her bed when it rained because she couldn’t get out of her house fast enough. I was just, I was just shocked. I said, what’d you do? He said, nothing. We can’t do anything. Nothing changes.
But I heard story after story like that, and I thought, oh, this is where I wanna be. This is where God is calling me to be.
To answer your question more directly, community organizing as we do it is institutional organizing based on relationships in the community where people in the community, in those institutions define their issues.
Like we don’t come in and say, you know, we need to do this, this. They define the issues, and the relationships are then formed among them so that the organization has power to change, power to change, and we’re not afraid of that word at all.
Marcus: Which word? Power or change?
Sister Pearl: Power. Real good. Marcus. Either one. Power or change. That’s a good insight, Marcus. And both of those have to be present for something to be different: power and change.
Marcus: That all makes sense on a level, although I honestly still have trouble imagining what it looks like as a job. In my mind, community organizing is associated with partisan politics. I think the first time I heard the phrase was the description of a presidential candidate who had gotten his start in community organizing. And I imagine people in my small-town hearing about community organizing and maybe thinking you’re aligned with a specific political party especially when you talk about power because politics is the negotiation of power. So how would you, how would you talk to somebody about the role of politics in community organizing? How do you walk that line?
Sister Pearl: Well, the first thing that we would tell them, I mean, straight out, is we are nonpartisan. I mean, we are, if one can be actively nonpartisan, we are actively nonpartisan. We support no party. And if one of our leaders in the organization wants to run for political office, they have to leave the organization. Because we don’t support candidates, we don’t support parties. We do a session on the kind of politics, if you will, we want to create as contrasted to the way politics is. For example, politics today is centered around candidates. Our politics is centered around the community and what issues the community sees that needs to change. Like in San Antonio, it was drainage, it was education, it was workforce development. No politician came to us and said, we need to change this. We, the organization went to them and said, these are the changes we want to see.
Camille: So it really sounds like, Sister Pearl, that many folks, myself included, that we kind of imagine community organizing as necessarily entangled with politics. And on the one hand you’re saying no, it really doesn’t start that way. But perhaps your efforts in that community organizing sphere can lead to—some of your solutions involve politics because they involve community leaders that are in in politics.
Sister Pearl: Definitely. And you know, this year in San Antonio, we’re having a mayoral election and city council election. So one of the things that you will see and hear about with COPS Metro is they will be having what we call accountability sessions with the candidates.
Again, it’s going to be politics as it should be, meaning the politicians don’t talk. The people talk, and then they will ask for a commitment from the politician. If you are elected, will you do such and such? And sometimes it is as simple as a yes or no answer, and that’s all they get to say yes or no.
And, you know, facing that many people, ah, 6, 7, 800 people, they’ll say yes. And then afterwards the organization will follow up with them.
Marcus: We’ve been talking a lot about community organizing, but I know that your community organizing really comes from your faith. We started with that in a sense indirectly because as a nun, you were a teacher. As a nun, you went on to become a social worker, and as a nun, you’re talking to us today. Can you talk more about the relationship between your faith and this effort and this work?
Sister Pearl: Yes, thank you. My spirituality, if you will, has always been based on the scriptures. Literally, by the grace of God, I had very good scripture courses in college. We were encouraged to major in theology, so I did, but that theology was based in scripture and looking at the life of Jesus. In terms of we are to become like Jesus. And so what always struck me about the scriptures is, you know, Jesus doesn’t lay out just a lot of rules for us.
He didn’t give us the 10 Commandments. When he was asked, what’s the most important commandment? He said, to love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with everything you have. The second is just like it love your neighbor as yourself. And that always, that just always struck me and stayed with me.
Love your neighbor as yourself. I grew up in a segregated Louisiana, and that formed in me. I went to an all-white Catholic school. And the fact that the African Americans had their own Catholic school, but it was segregated all black. But our sisters, the Sisters of Divine Providence, who taught me in Louisiana were very smart.
What they did, they would invite the all-black Catholic school to come to our gym in Alexandria, Louisiana, and perform for us because the sisters would tell us, which was true, they have the best choir in the state. They have won first place in state competitions, and we want to you to hear them perform well.
We had a choir, but we didn’t win any state competitions. And so my question when they would come, or my insight was, you know, I have been taught informally that whites are superior to blacks, but if they can sing better than us, if they can win all these competitions, and we don’t. There is something not right about this. And if they’re better in singing, what else are they better than us in?
Marcus: So you’re working your whole life, organizing these communities, listening to people’s problems, trying to do power analysis, like you said, to to decide which area of the community can begin to address the problems. Sometimes that’s politics, sometimes it’s not. All the time. You move forward two steps, you move back one step, you move forward, two steps, you move back three steps. How do you do this work and remain hopeful? How do you do this work and not have a sense of frustration by the, the slow progress and the just constant battle to prevent backsliding?
Sister Pearl: Well, for me, what I keep in mind is we wouldn’t have moved at all. If it hadn’t been for the organizations, and so, you know what? What’s the alternative? Yeah. I don’t see an alternative except through the organizations we’ve built. And even though it’s, you know, we’ll be moving back, as you say, a step or two, but I don’t know what the alternative is. I haven’t seen anything or anybody be able to permanently hold something in place.
Camille: Sister Pearl, you talked about something that reminded me of a quote I read from you. I think a reporter was interviewing you, perhaps, or, or someone for an article and they must have asked you. What are your plans? What are, what are the big things that you’re planning to do as you’re the leader? And you said that the first thing you wanted to do was meet with each of the sisters to see where their energies are. And I loved that quote from you. You went on to talk about how that’s what’s important, that any leader should have a pulse on the people he or she is leading. And you talked about a sermon that you had heard where the sentiment was if you’re a leader and you look behind you and then there’s no one following, then you’re just a fool.
Sister Pearl: You’re, you’re just out for a walk.
Camille: Yes. You’re just a fool out for a walk. Right. Can you talk more about that, because that’s what I’m seeing here from you as a through line. The importance of having a pulse on neighborhood or community or anyone that you are leading or hoping to help lead folks to change?
Sister Pearl: What I have learned in organizing, and I’m very grateful for, is when you can tap into people’s energies and their interests, then they will do what they need to do, and then you know what you can talk to them about.
In terms of how to direct their energies, how to focus it, who else is interested in the same thing? Because a lot of times, we think we’re out there by ourselves, and we don’t know that other people have the same issues and want to do something about it. And then, you know, it’s connecting all the people with the same interest and then moving that forward.
And literally, that’s why I’ve always liked that quote of, If you’re a leader and there’s no one behind you, then you’re just out taking a walk. You have fooled yourself on who you are and what kind of change can happen. Because we’re limited as one, but if we have a group behind us, we can do what we need to do.
Marcus: I mean, our capacity to fool ourselves. That is, oh man. You mentioned studying religion. You mentioned teaching religion. You talked about your spirituality. I heard you last year speak, and you defined religion as a binding together. And so essentially when you say the leader is out for a walk, they’re not bound together to the people they’re trying to lead. And I hear so many people talk today about wanting to be spiritual but not religious and sort of wanting to hold onto their sense of the divine, but not wanting to be, they don’t use the word bound together, but in a sense I think people are maybe afraid of being bound together. Maybe they’re rejecting it. Could you just talk to us a little bit about the, the power of religion? As a force, as one of these institutions that you’ve been working with all these years?
Sister Pearl: I think, I’m not positive about this, but I think that people have become turned off, if you will, by organized religion, because organized religion doesn’t always, it’s not always interested in them as a person,
Organized religion is presented to them as you need to believe this, this, this, and this, and you need to do this, this, this, and this, and that’s not what organized religion or churches were formed to do. Churches were formed to respond to the needs of their congregation.
Marcus: It’s like it comes down to loving your neighbor. Right, exactly. If, if they can go and serve the mass to the neighbor, then that is a form of loving the neighbor.
Camille: Sister Pearl. I’m just hearing so much about what it looks like today. Have a community and do it well. To do community well, to work within neighborhoods to know your neighbor. And it’s reminding me of a great quote we have, right, Marcus?
Marcus: From Laity Lodge. So this is from a retreat in 2020. Laity Lodge is our adult retreat center which is organized and put on by the H. E. Butt Foundation. This is from a retreat, and we’re gonna hear from Nicole Amery, who is talking about, Say Si. She’s a teacher in San Antonio, and you were talking earlier about the power of art to bridge across communities that have been separated and segregated. And she’s talking about the power of art to bring neighborhoods together. So I just would love to listen to this little clip from Laity Lodge with you and hear your take on it.
Nicole: Neighborhoods. You fix neighborhoods and you have these ponds of resources and love for the school. And that’s what we do at Say Si. We build community, we build neighborhood. Our mission is to ignite the creative power of young people as forces of positive change in the world. And they can only do that. I can only fulfill my mission if they have a place to live, if they’re fed, if they’re healthy, if I know that they’re going home to a family that knows how to support them or knows the resources.
So my job very much is way beyond our doors. What I grew up with were people who cared and shared. With potlucks. With saying, I have this to offer, does anybody have that? And it’s just this beautiful thing. And I miss that from growing up at Easter when the neighbors would get together, you know, and where there was food and there was the ice cream and lots of adults carrying not just my lonely parents.
Sister Pearl: Initially I think we’re talking about the same thing, but we go a little bit further. Meaning we ask people to have those conversations among themselves in groups and to center their conversations around what kind of changes would they like to see in their neighborhoods, and what are they willing to do about it.
Not what do they want other people to do for them, but what are they willing to do to bring about those changes? So I would just take what she said as the foundation that has to be there first instead.
Marcus: You have to have a community before you can organize it. I wonder, do we have a community problem right now that makes organizing harder? Are our neighbors less bound together? Not just because of the distrust of religion, but just we feel like we don’t know how to be together? We feel lonely.
Camille: In post covid, right, when we were isolated and alone.
Marcus: Even going back before that, when mobile phones, smartphones came out, we saw this rapid decline in mental health among students and adults because they’re now connected to their phone more than they’re connected to their neighbor.
Sister Pearl: Unfortunately, we have been acculturated to relate to people who look like us, talk like us, think like us, or we don’t think our neighbor is someone who is different than us. We go for the person who is like us. And that is very limiting. Incredibly limiting. So if we’re not talking to people different than we are, that doesn’t happen.
Our organizations, what I didn’t mention, are intentionally multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi religion. We have Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Protestants. Whole mix and we’re intentional as we form them. Multi-income. In COPS they have one of the wealthiest, not the wealthiest, but one of the wealthiest congregations in the city that belong as well as some of the poorest on the West Side. And they all get together and talk about their interests. All of them. And what they were shocked to find out both, I hate to say both sides, but both groups: When the poorer communities were talking about police and police protection, that’s exactly what the wealthiest people were talking about. They didn’t feel they had police or adequate police protection and both sides, I hate to say sides, but both groups were shocked. They said, oh my gosh. I just thought, you know, you would never be concerned about police protection. Well, yes, we are.
Camille: Finding commonalities across groups that you didn’t think would find them. That’s so good. Thank you so much.
Sister Pearl: Yes, you’re welcome. Thank you.
Marcus: All this has been delightful.
Camille: Yes, we’ve enjoyed it.
Marcus: The Echoes Podcast is written and produced by Camille Hall-Ortega, Rob Stennett, and me, Marcus Goodyear. It’s edited by Rob Stennett and Kim Stone. Our executive producers are Patton Dodd and David Rogers. Special thanks to our guest today, Sister Pearl Caesar. The Echoes Podcast is a production brought to you by the H. E. Butt Foundation.
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