CRM Empowering Leaders

Many people think of San Diego as “America’s Finest City” with its great beaches, the zoo, the Gaslamp Quarter, and Balboa Park. But there’s another side to this city that we sometimes miss. San Diego is a border city. Its economy, its social structure, and its politics are inextricably linked with its sister city—Tijuana—just to the south. These two diverse mega cities straddling the most trafficked border in the world create a very complex, and unique metropolis.

The city’s majority population is non-white, non-middle class. They often work 2 to 3 jobs a day to survive, and rarely visit the places that tourists enjoy every day. San Diego is also one of the United States’ designated sanctuary cities. There are significant refugee populations from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia sprinkled throughout the city’s downtown neighborhoods, and these groups all face significant challenges.

San Diego is also one of our country’s major sex trafficking gateway cities. Thousands of young women, many of them underage, are smuggled into San Diego every year from Mexico City via Tijuana. They come from places like Russia, Eastern Europe, Asia, and South America. They are drugged, sold, enslaved, and often housed in buildings many of us may have walked past but have never noticed.

There is also a young, vibrant, artistic culture in both San Diego and Tijuana that is challenging the air-brushed image the city planners wish to cultivate, and is exposing people to both truth and beauty.

The legal border between the United States and Mexico lies 15 miles south of the city center, but the real border lies about 1500 yards south of downtown where cultures from around the world collide. These are the neighborhoods we believe God is calling us to move into, to serve, and from within to develop young missional leaders to send out across town or across the world.

Our Ministry

In the fall of 2008 three families moved into the Golden Hill neighborhood of San Diego to start NieuCommunities. Today the community is over 20 people from diverse backgrounds, with diverse abilities, and all at different stages of submerging into the city. These are some of the areas we have begun to engage and are pursuing as a community:

• Mentoring refugee families
• Coaching inner-city youth in soccer and basketball
• Offering missional training for other leaders in the city
• Serving with a like-minded leaders in Mexico
• Granting micro-loans for refugees to start businesses
• Created a new art/craft collective for our neighborhood

Use the links to the right to learn more about NieuCommunities San Diego and various opportunities for getting involved. Learn more about NieuCommunities here.

Stories from NieuCommunities San Diego

Coach Ryan Discovers His Calling

About three years ago, when my wife and I first arrived in San Diego, our team leader, Rob, and I walked into the office of the newly hired varsity basketball coach for the local high school and...

Churches and Liquor Stores

“We don’t need any more liquor stores and churches in my neighborhood.”

It would have been easy for me to dismiss these words, but something about Jerry’s passion for the neighborhood...

Sitting at the (Unlikely) Kingdom Banquet

As I scanned the room electric with people from such vastly different backgrounds, yet interacting in such dynamic ways, I couldn’t help but seeing this as a snapshot of the Kingdom Banquet Jesus...

Thin Places

This past Saturday I ran into some friends from the park while walking through our neighborhood Farmer’s Market. One of the friends was Matt, my teammate with ...

Navigating Tijuana

We’ve been privileged to take leaders from all over the world through a life-focusing, calling-clarifying process we call Life Compass. Ironically though we’ve never taken it just across the...