Interfaith Investing for Social Justice

by: Jeremy Burton

Fri Jun 04, 2010 at 09:32:36 AM EDT

Nice profile of the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility in today's NY Times by Clyde Haberman.

ICCR, which has been around for 40 years, is an interfaith partnership to promote and facilitate socially responsible investing.  It's a mostly Christian crowd, with two Jewish members:  the Reform movement's pension fund, and Jewish Funds for Justice. 

Haberman:

Laura Berry... is the executive director of an organization that bears that very idea in its name: the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. It doesn’t accept that doing good and doing well have to be mutually exclusive at American companies, recent experience notwithstanding. If ever the corporate world could use a healthy infusion of responsibility, this would seem to be the time.

“We come at this issue from a moral perspective, but we also come at it as investors,” Ms. Berry said. “I actually believe that God, whatever God is, set up the system so that it works better when we don’t cheat.”

The core work of ICCR centers around proxy voting and social screening of investment decsions, but beyond that, as a collaborative and creative space for people of faith who manage money (like Jeffrey Dekro, President of our investment funds and an ICCR board member), it is also

Adding to the Growing Katrina Anniversary Observances

by: Philip Bump

Thu Apr 29, 2010 at 10:23:22 AM EDT

Change will come gradually to Gulf Coast

by: Aleeza Lubin

Mon Apr 12, 2010 at 13:46:01 PM EDT

Cross-posted on The Miscellany News, Vassar College. 

By: Emil Ostrovski

On the second to last day of my service-learning trip to the Gulf Coast, I stood in a circle with my fellow volunteers and waited my turn as we went round and shared our final reflections. I stood there and tried to find something meaningful to say about all the work that still needed to be done, even five years after Hurricane Katrina. About little Boothville in Southern Louisiana, a town that made Poughkeepsie look like a gleaming metropolis, and that had, thanks to Hurricane Katrina, spent several weeks literally underwater. About the young family whom we’d helped a bit towards creating a viable living space out of a broken and beaten old trailer. About all the empty lots in Boothville to which families might want to return, though they lacked the means to do so, and about the rows of deserted homes in New Orleans with writing on their walls—writing that had been telling the same story since the first volunteers set it down—what it was that they’d found inside in the initial aftermath of the storm.

Before, Now, Soon... in Central City, New Orleans

by: Jeremy Burton

Fri Apr 02, 2010 at 10:48:55 AM EDT

Last June, when I made my 1st visit to this site in Central City, New Orleans (that's just lakeside from the Garden District), it was a virtually empty lot, with the groundbreaking yet to come for The Muses, a mixed income housing development that is an important part of the post Katrina recovery in this community and for the city.

I was visiting with the Isaiah Funds board, on which I now serve.  Isaiah is an interfaith partnership for disaster recovery, managed by JFSJ with several Christian, Jewish and foundation partner/investors, that came together to raise community investment capital after Katrina.  Our 1st loan?  To Gulf Coast Housing Partnership,the non-profit developer of the Muses.

The above picture was taken last Fall in the early stages of development.  Here's how the property looks now:

Bar Mitzvahs That Don't Suck

by: Mik Moore

Mon Feb 22, 2010 at 21:38:47 PM EST

The presidents of the Jewish Funds for Justice (Simon Greer) and American Jewish World Service (Ruth Messinger) have teamed up to present a new idea called Passport for Service.  The full piece is on JTA. Here are the key graphs:

All B’nai Mitzvah would receive a formal invitation to Passport for Service, which would include at least one free service-learning immersion experience on a program of their choosing, either with their families or independently. They would participate in pre- and post-trip programming, and, upon their return, would make a commitment to continuing their social justice work in their local community.

These activities would be reinforced with an electronic “passport,” in which each young activist would accumulate “stamps” indicating their community service experiences and the other seminal events on their Jewish journey. Each passport would represent a path to Jewish adulthood defined by ongoing contributions to the world.

The nuts and bolts of creating such a program could take many forms. We could establish an umbrella organization to coordinate trips conducted by practitioners. We could organize it locally, giving Jewish Community Centers or synagogues a fresh opportunity to engage a core constituency. We could bring together key service organizations to pilot the project in ten cities and then scale it up later for national implementation. Or we could create a funding share, pooling money from foundations, individual funders, JCCs, federations, and synagogues. Similar to Birthright, this fund would ensure that every B’nai Mitzvah has an immersion service-learning experience of their choosing.

Inspired participants, eager to stay connected, would seek out ways to serve and act together. Synagogues and grassroots organizations would connect this transformative experience to their programming and engagement opportunities. Our community, and our local partners in social change, would be poised to engage thousands of young Jews hungry to change the world.

The Saints: one battle won in a larger war for recovery

by: Jamie Beran

Mon Feb 08, 2010 at 12:00:21 PM EST

According to the New York Times "at long last, the Saints have arrived, and they brought New Orleans back with them."  And in many ways, this is true.  The game last night was amazing, even miraculous.  They came back from a 10 point deficit, tying the superbowl come-back record.  They took risk after risk, the biggest of which an onside kick to open the second half, and each payed off.  Pivotal calls fell in their favor.  And when they sealed the deal in an incredible forth quarter interception, they reminded America that New Orleans will surprise us, time and again.

My partner is a bit of a sports nut, and he regularly reminds me that sports, at their core, are not about competition and combat.  Rather they provide us an emotional escape - we get swept up in the drama and a winning franchise truly can capture the hearts and minds of a city.  Winning the Superbowl is the pinnacle of this - one game to prove to America that your team - and your city - is the best of this best.  

So the story of New Orleans winning the Superbowl, 4 1/2 years after Katrina, provides an even deeper emotional angle.  Images of the superdome filled with starving, homeless, desparate people are juxtaposed with quarterback Drew Brees holding the Lombardi trophy and all-night parties in the French Quarter. 

However, as we continue to send Service Learning groups to New Orleans as volunteers, support our Gulf Coast fellows in their organizing work, and invest in redevelopment, we know that New Orleans is not yet fully back...

Geux Gulf Fellows, Geux Saints!

by: Jeremy Burton

Sun Feb 07, 2010 at 08:58:08 AM EST

Its Sunday morning and I’m on my way down to South Carolina, where I’ll hopefully be watching the Super Bowl tonight at a retreat together with the Gulf Coast Fellows for Community Transformation (GCFCT); a fellowship in support of 17 of the most amazing community organizers from across 4 states (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi & Alabama), working to help their communities create a just and equitable recovery from hurricanes Katrina and Rita. GCFCT is collaboration between JFSJ, the 21st Century Foundation and the Gulf Coast Fund for Community Renewal, who joined forces two years ago to share our expertise and a long-term vision for the recovery.

The truth is that six months ago, when we scheduled the retreat, taking the fellows away for respite (so desperately needed by these tireless leaders) and skills building this week, we – the staff on the ground and at the sponsoring foundations – maybe lacked the imagination to foresee this Super Bowl Sunday and the monumental excitement being felt in New Orleans and throughout the Gulf Coast today. But, despite the odds and a less than stellar track record over the last 4 decades, the Saints today are a living embodiment of the hopes, dreams and aspirations of a community that has been dealt, and dealt itself at times, a pretty bad hand over the past decades (the disaster wasn’t Katrina, it was the decades of failed leadership, lack of imagination, and poor planning that created the conditions for the storm to leave behind such destruction).

What the Saints have done this season, and what the 17 fellows do every day on the ground, is encourage and empower the people of the Gulf Coast to imagine something bigger and better. These fellows, working with immigrants, low-income communities, youth, the formerly incarcerated; working

Reflections from New Orleans

by: LouAnn Smith

Mon Dec 14, 2009 at 17:19:40 PM EST

"The Audacity of Despair"

by: Hannah Farber

Thu Sep 11, 2008 at 00:01:05 AM EDT

This excellent phrase was the title of a talk David Simon gave at Berkeley this evening.  David Simon is the mastermind, most recently, of The Wire and Generation Kill, and his next series will be about musicians in the Treme putting their lives back together after Hurricane Katrina. When he's not making awesome TV series, David Simon likes to rant about the screwed up state of journalism in this country.

For example: you may be aware that during Hurricane Katrina, a great deal of damage was caused by a barge that either broke or (more likely) slid through a breach in the Industrial Canal into the Lower Ninth Ward. So you would think, given the extensive coverage of what happened with this barge, and the extensive evacuating procedures that were mandated before Hurricane Gustav, somebody would remember to get all the barges out of the Industrial Canal this time.

A Report from PICO LIFT, and some thoughts

by: Alex Haber

Tue Sep 09, 2008 at 15:05:18 PM EDT

I received a call today from Reverend Jennifer Jones-Bridgett, the director of PICO LIFT (Louisiana Interfaith Together), whose main offices are located in Baton Rouge.  She updated me on the view from the ground now, over a week after Hurricane Gustav made landfall.  As before, I've copied highlights from our conversation below.

- Most areas of Louisiana have had their utilities returned, except for Baton Rouge and Thibodaux.  Most of PICO LIFT's Baton Rouge staff are still without utilities, and they've experienced serious roof damage.  It's also easy to forget that when the electricity stays out for a long time, so do other utilities, like the sewer system.

- PICO LIFT has had a daily conference line open to its associates who are now all around the country.  They are trying to deal with both short-term relief and longer-term recovery, as well as being a resource for information about government activities and insurance issues, which has been difficult to find.

- One of the issues they've been dealing with is the unseen costs of the evacuation.  People and businesses without utlities now, for example, if they are lucky enough to have generators, are spending a lot more on gas to power them.

- One of the major problems they've seen is that people and the media are not paying attention to the serious effects that Gustav had on the region because so much attention was focused on New Orleans, which was largely spared.  The rural areas have been especially forgotten, not only by the media but by relief-providers as well.  There are areas where there is still no water or ice; even when resources do arrive, many people in the rural areas have no means of transportation to go get it.

- PICO is now trying to capture people's stories and to tell them that there's hope in working together.  There was a tremendous amount of loss, not in lives, but in quality of life.

Having talked to three of our partners on the ground now, it seems to me that there are two common themes here: the difficulty of adequate access to information, both before and after the storm (what Leroy Johnson described as a "ball of confusion"), and the continuing ignorance of the suffering of the rural areas.  All three of the people I talked to described how difficult it was to know who to contact about what issue, or to find out when someone can return home, or what insurance and FEMA redevelopment funds people are entitled to.  This is, of course, disproportionately difficult for non-English speakers and the poor.  And Leroy Johnson at Southern Echo and Reverend Jones-Bridgett at PICO LIFT both discussed the rural areas, both the lingering effects of Katrina and the difficulty of relief and recovery in the wake of Gustav.  The fact that one is located in Jackson, Mississippi, and the other in Baton Rouge, Lousiana, but they both described almost exactly the same issue says to me that it is serious and relevant across the region.  It seems to me that if action is to happen in the wake of this hurricane season, it should focus around these two issues.