By Alma Campos

Every year, the NAACP holds a rally from March 4-9 to commemorate the Selma to Montgomery march and draw attention to the issues facing African Americans in America. Since the passage of Alabama’s HB 56—the nation’s worst anti-immigrant law—the NAACP has reached out to organizations around the country to build lasting relationships between Civil Rights and Immigrant Rights communities over their common history of struggle. The event marks the coming together of a broad movement for a renewed call for civil rights in America. This year, a core part of their agenda was a demand to repeal HB 56.

Gamaliel, a grassroots network of non-partisan, faith-based organizations in 18 U.S. states, South Africa and the United Kingdom, is now taking on the voting rights issue. They are working together with the NAACP and other social justice organizations on “Get out the Vote” initiatives for the Fall elections.

Among the participants in the Selma to Montgomery march this year was 28-year-old Carlos Pinedo, who emigrated from Mexico with his family at the age of eight. In the racially diverse community in Chicago’s South Suburbs, young Pinedo soon became conscious of the tensions and boundaries between blacks, Latinos and whites and quickly adopted the racial stereotypes he learned from his new friends. Growing up in Blue Island, Illinois, Carlos and his brother Jose became targets of racial profiling themselves. Things took a nasty turn when Jose was arrested by ICE officers in front of his mother on Mother’s Day for failing to present a state-issued picture ID to police officials who were questioning him for no legitimate reason. He was deported to Mexico, leaving behind his family and newborn child.

The incident prompted Carlos to become a leader with the South Suburban Action Conference (SSAC) and Gamaliel’s Civil Rights of Immigrants Task Force, working to raise awareness about racial profiling and its negative impact on families. In 2010, SSAC was able to persuade Blue Island Mayor Donald Peloquin to sign a resolution allowing undocumented immigrants to present the Matricula Consular as a valid form of identification.

Pinedo decided to participate in the march because, as he says, “I felt that now more than ever, I needed to show my community that what I have been working for is really worth it. In this way, I can stand for the ones who have no voice.”Florida Immigrant Coalition marches from Selma to Montgomery, 2012. Courtesy of Equal Voice News.

The march made Pinedo acutely aware of other communities all over the U.S. who have been fighting for the same thing—namely, human rights.

The Reverend David Bigsby, co-founder and president of the Gamaliel National Clergy Council, also attended the march. He was at Morehouse College in Atlanta during the 1965 Selma-Montgomery March. “Voting rights were especially important to me because neither my parents nor anyone in our family had ever voted, except me,” he recalls. “They feared what would happen if they attempted to register. Most of them could not read very well and did not think their vote would make a difference. The 1965 march caused my father to find the courage to vote for the first time. He had served in WWII but did not feel he was a valued citizen.”

One young leader with Gamaliel, Eliza Perez-Montalvo, is responding to the call for renewed black-brown unity, saying: “Marching today is the beginning of my journey.”

Alma Campos is the communications coordinator for Pilsen Neighbors Community Council, a Gamaliel affiliate.

http://urbanhabitat.org/19-1/campos

Name: Ana Garcia-Ashley

Title/Occupation: Executive Director

Organization: Gamaliel Foundation

What Makes The Person A Game Changer: Ana Garcia-Ashley is the first woman of color in America to head a national community organizing network. Born in the Dominican Republic in 1958, Garcia-Ashley was just four years old when she began canvassing in a rural village as part of a public safety campaign headed by her grandmother, a neighborhood activist. She joined Gamaliel in 1992 as the lead organizer of MICAH in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she led one of the most successful campaigns in Gamaliel’s history: winning a $500 million commitment from local banks to invest in affordable housing. As a result, 7,000 low-income families in Milwaukee were able to buy homes. Garcia-Ashley also founded Gamaliel’s statewide Wisconsin affiliate, WISDOM.

To learn more about Ana Garcia-Ashley and Gamaliel, visit http://www.gamaliel.org/.

http://politic365.com/2012/07/09/ana-garcia-ashley/

Kalamazoo congregation lauded for wide-ranging social justice efforts

People’s Church earns UUA’s 2012 Bennett Award for social action.
By Donald E. Skinner

The roots of social justice work run deep at People’s Church, Kalamazoo, Mich., the winner of the 2012 Bennett Award. In 1892 it opened a free public kindergarten. It followed that with a gymnasium for women, a school of “household science,” a manual training class for men, and a literary club called “The Frederick Douglass Club” for blacks.

In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, it was active in school integration, reproductive rights, and gay and lesbian rights. Currently it is engaged in more than a dozen social justice programs from non-discrimination to prison ministry and domestic violence, and it is undertaking a major new initiative around antiracism.

The Bennett Award for Congregational Action on Human Justice and Social Action is an annual honor given by the Unitarian Universalist Association to a congregation that has done exemplary work in social justice. The award’s selection team wrote to the Kalamazoo congregation in April: “We were inspired at the breadth and depth of your ministry. Your congregation’s steady progression toward a healthy, multicultural, and anti-racist/anti-oppressive justice-oriented congregation is admirable and deserves to be publicly recognized.” The team was led by Susan Leslie, the UUA’s director of the Office for Congregational Advocacy and Witness. The award will be presented at General Assembly June 20-24 in Phoenix, Ariz.

Much of the congregation’s early social justice work was taken on by individuals since the congregation had long had a philosophy that the church itself should never take a stand on issues.

In the mid-1990s the congregation went through a period of conflict. Then by 1998 it was ready for a new approach. It called the Rev. Jill McAllister, who had a deep commitment to social justice. In 2000 she suggested the creation of a “social concerns committee.” The following year two board members attended a Heartland District social justice workshop and brought home information and enthusiasm. That was followed by an all-church planning retreat to talk about social justice, among other topics.

A Social Justice Coordinating Committee was formed out of that retreat. One of its first projects was to bring in the Rev. William Gardiner and Rev. Cynthia Prescott to conduct a Social Justice Empowerment Workshop in 2002.

“They showed us that freedom of conscience and a congregation standing up for what it believed in were not mutually exclusive,” said McAllister. “We began to speak the language that there were things that we believed in so much as a congregation that we could stand up and say so.”

Then came the Gamaliel Foundation and DART. These two community organizing groups arrived in Kalamazoo about the same time. Members of People’s Church learned about both, then joined Gamaliel, and through it, helped form an interfaith organizing network, ISAAC (Interfaith Strategy for Action & Advocacy in the Community) in 2002.

Since then, the congregation’s work in the community has taken off. Members of People’s Church became involved in ISAAC’s many task forces. Some became leaders of city-wide coalitions, securing major grants for family health and for preschool education. In 2009 ISAAC helped defeat a proposed repeal of a city non-discrimination ordinance for LGBT people.

Members are involved in many other social justice activities, as well. Some members volunteer as mentors at a local school. The Green Sanctuary task force organizes road cleanup activities and sales of fair trade coffee and candy. There is a support group for people just out of prison. And members help prepare a weekly meal for homeless people.

People’s Church is also a partner with a Transylvania congregation and a new congregation in Bujumbura, Burundi. In the latter partnership it is supporting a microlending program, has advocated for the rights of indigenous people there, and supported the congregation in its fight to prevent the criminalization of LGBT people.

People’s Church’s newest venture, getting under way this fall, is a deep exploration around antiracism and multiculturalism.

In its letter of application for the Bennett Award, congregational leaders noted the congregation’s social justice evolution. “We have gone from writing individual letters to the editor to engaging deeply as a congregation together with others across religious, economic, and race divides in our community to work powerfully with our local and state elected officials to accomplish social justice actions that impact much closer to the core of the issues addressed.”

McAllister said ISAAC was transformative for the congregation. “Some of our members moved quickly and easily into leadership of that coalition and it began to depend on us. Within ISAAC we are seen as a congregation that always turns people out for events and who are competent and effective at what we do.”

She said she preaches only infrequently about social justice. “Social justice is not the primary function of church,” McAlister said. “The primary function is to help people learn about and practice living in right relation within the church and in families. If you can’t do it with people in your congregation, how can you create peace in the world?”

She is enthusiastic about this fall’s exploration of antiracism and multiculturalism. “How do you actually change the way you interact with others? There are skills that can be learned by people and organizations to that end. Antiracism work often gets you to the talking level and then stops short. If you’re still embedded in your own habits, it just stops. Now, there are ways to learn skills and to practice them in the congregation. This is a very exciting thing we’re moving into. “

Phil Kramer, chair of the congregation’s Social Justice Coordinating Committee, credits three factors for the congregation’s engagement in community work. “Having a new minister who was committed to social justice in a different way than prior ministers. Then with the workshop with Bill Gardiner and Cynthia Prescott we began to identify a model we wanted to pursue. The third thing was the arrival of ISAAC. It gave us good impetus for moving ahead.”

He said the congregation has a core group of about 40 people who are deeply engaged in social justice. “There’s a second larger circle of people who will participate when they’re called upon. The congregation as a whole will support causes in more minor ways.”

Kramer added, “I don’t feel that we’re unique. What we have is good leadership. The minister’s role is very important. So is a core group that’s prepared to start an issue off. I feel very proud about being involved in social issues and receiving the Bennett Award. Our social justice work is part of our UU values system. It’s who we are.”

The Bennett Award for Congregational Action on Human Justice and Social Action, instituted in 1999 by James Bennett to honor the congregation that has done exemplary work in social justice, is accompanied by a $500 cash award. Dr. James R. Bennett is professor emeritus of the University of Arkansas and he is the former director of the Gustavus Meyers Center of Human Rights in North America, founded in 1984. Bennett is a member of the UU Fellowship of Fayetteville, Ark.

This story originally appeared on the uuworld.org on June 25, 2012 and is available here: http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/208834.shtml