Salt of the Earth: Idea exchange

The Idea Exchange

Need to find some activities to liven up your parish or church's interest in social justice? Here's some ways to work for justice.

Eight million hours to go . . .
One commuter has pledged to smile at other drivers on the way to work. A U.S. soldier says he promises to help people, "regardless of rank." An artist says she will use her talents to enlighten others, while another person plans to specifically promote racial tolerance. Hundreds say they will pray for peace.

Together, these people and thousands of others have pledged a total of 667, 661 hours of peacemaking activities as part of "1,000 Years of Peace." The project's goal of is to achieve a millennium's worth of actions for peace—a total of 8,766,000 hours.

"Peacemaking is not just for world leaders. It is for all of us," says Sister Mary Bookser, S.C., of Sisters United News, which is cosponsoring the project with St. Anthony Messenger Press. "We urge people of all faiths—as well as people of no faith—to join this effort," she says.

The project was launched on the Internet in December at www.PledgePeace.org. People can make their pledges via email, read a sample of others' pledges, and get ideas for peacemaking activities at the site. It also includes a counter to monitor the number of hours pledged.

"We are thrilled that so many people have responded to the call to be peacemakers," says Judy Ball of St. Anthony Messenger Press. "We will continue to invite people to build peace hour-by-hour, day-by-day, in their homes and neighborhoods and at work. If it takes five or 10 years more, so be it. We think 8.7 million hours are attainable—and they surely are worth the effort."—Heidi Schlumpf
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Get personal with Congress on global debt relief
The Jubilee 2000 Campaign offers this suggestion as an activity that can involve your church or school on the issue of international debt relief:

Turn up the Heat!
September Action: Let's Show the Face of Children to Congress

"In the cool corridors of financial power, the plight of the debt-ridden may be spoken of in terms of capital flows, debt-service ratios and credit ratings. In the heat and dust of real life, however, debt is about lives, people's lives and—above all—children's lives."—UNICEF, 1999

The 106th Congress will be wrapping up its year 2000 business in September. Legislators will have lots of distractions, with fall elections approaching. We have to break through with a message that's more than just a plain letter, making clear the debt is a life and death issue. To dramatically get this across, we have produced an 8" x 11" black and white flyer with photos of 19 children living in impoverished, indebted countries. These 19 children symbolize the 19,000 children who die every day from the effects of crushing debt.

During September, we want you to mail that flyer to your Senators and Representative in Washington. Include a handwritten message on the back calling for full financing of debt relief programs. You can get a copy of the flyer by e-mailing coord@j2000usa.org (if you are on our mailing list you will get one with our newsletter by 9/11—you can purchase a color 15" x 24" version from J2000/USA for just $1, including postage).

Be creative! Make your own large poster collage, using pictures from magazines, etc., writing a message on the back. It's also a great way to involve a school or youth group.

Congress members must not leave Washington before ensuring a full U.S. contribution to existing debt relief programs. Even though the House made progress when it approved $225 million in debt relief for poor countries on July 13, this amount still falls short of the $435 million the U.S. has committed to pay this year. The competition for funds in the final weeks of Congress will be intense. Please continue to urge your members of Congress to approve, at a minimum, the full $435 million for debt relief.

Points you may want to make in your letter:
The United States must contribute its fair share to the international debt plan, as a vital step toward the goals of Jubilee 2000. Every dollar the U.S. contributes to the trust fund will leverage more than $20 dollars from other international creditors.

Congress must keep the international debt plan on track. Unless all creditors act in concert, the plan cannot move forward.

Debt relief will help countries carry out their poverty reduction efforts, fighting infectious diseases, putting more children in school, and rebuilding roads and bridges lost to recent floods.

Debt cancellation must not be conditioned on policy reforms that perpetuate or deepen poverty or environmental degradation.

Tips on writing your letter:
Be personal—a mailed handwritten letter receives much greater attention than a preprinted card or letter.

Be sure to include your return address.

State something specific and be concise.

Express clearly and briefly what action you would like. One or two paragraphs should be enough. Tell why this is important. Put the situation in concrete terms.

Addresses:
The Honorable... (Name), U.S. House of Representatives 20515
The Honorable...(Name), US Senate, Washington, DC 20510

Background Resources:
People in indebted, impoverished countries are active and engaged in demanding an end to debt bondage. Read about how child workers who belong to Manthoc, a Peruvian workers-rights group organized and run by its young members, have gathered 18,000 signatures on the Jubilee 2000 petition:

UNICEF—Debt Has a Child's Face

Debt cancellation can really help kids. Uganda has used newly-available funds to dramatically expand primary education.

UNAIDS Report estimates over one-third of today's 15-year-olds will die of aids in worst-affected countries—and calls for debt relief as part of the solution.

The UN General Assembly declared in June, 1999: "To spend more on external debt than on basic social services—when hundreds of millions of children lack access to basic education, PHC, adequate food and safe drinking water—is not just morally wrong, it does not make economic sense."

Learn about debt and education from Oxfam.
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Your faith can be built right in
A pamphlet available from the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice (NICWJ) helps those involved in congregational building projects to establish and apply ethical criteria for selecting a contractor.

Like all purchasers of building services, congregations want to find the highest quality work at the lowest cost. Congregations, however, "must insure that their purchases reflect their values," says the publication, called "Building Projects and Religious Values: Ethical Questions for Congregations to Ask Building Contractors."

Step one in the process is to see if your local denominational governing body has building policies already in place. For example, the Roman Catholic dioceses of Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Madison, Milwaukee, and Youngstown have policies. If your congregation does not have recourse to a national or denominational policy, the pamphlet describes the steps involved in developing an ethical process.

First, articulate the values the congregation or building committee wants to follow, e.g., dealing only with companies that respect workers' right to organize, provide workers' compensation, health, pension, and other benefits, have a good health and safety record, and do not practice discriminatory hiring, among other standards. Once these values are clarified, congregational leadership should then develop a short questionnaire to query prospective contractors on their business values.

Beyond getting direct answers from building firms and contractors themselves, the pamphlet lists trade and governmental agencies and organizations with whom congregations can check the past performance of contractors. The pamphlet can be obtained by writing: NICWJ, 1020 West Bryn Mawr Avenue, 4th Floor, Chicago, Illinois 60660; phone: 773-728-8400, Fax: 773-728-8409; e-mail: nicwj@igc.org.
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This land is landmined
For children in Vietnam's Quang Tri Province, going outside to play is a life-threatening experience. An average of one child or villager a week there is killed or maimed by a landmine.

Recently a group called Earthstewards Network helped provide a solution. In November, 40 volunteers from the U.S., Europe, and Asia, teenage to retirement age, joined 40 Vietnamese volunteers there in creating Friendship Forest Park.

After it had been cleared of landmines,the volunteers spent three weeks planting thousands of indigenous trees on 18 acres of land that was once a U.S. military base. The agriculture and vegetation in that area has never recovered from the carpet bombing and defoliants dropped during the war.

The volunteers also built a Landmine Education Center in the park, to teach people how to minimize risk in the landmine-infested areas. The province still has 58,000 unexploded landmines.

Peacetrees Vietnam is the 20th international reforestation project sent by Earthstewards, and the first in Vietnam. To find out how your parish can get involved, contact Earth-stewards Network, P.O. Box 10697, Bainbridge, Washington 98110. Phone 206-842-7986.

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Closing the school for assassins
In one of the most overlooked news stories of 1996, The Pentagon admitted last fall that a training manual for Latin American soldiers at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia taught methods of torture and assassination.

Still, the admission only corroborated what protesters have known for years. To drive home the seriousness of this admission, 400 demonstrators gathered outside the school on November 16—the anniversary of the murders of six Jesuit priests and two women in El Salvador in 1989. Nineteen of the 26 officers cited for these killings were graduates of the school. In fact, so many graduates have been implicated in mass murders and human-rights violations that the school has been dubbed the School of Assassins.

Sixty of the protesters were arrested for trespassing on the property while planting crosses bearing the names of graduates' victims, such as Archbishop Oscar Romero and Jean Donovan.

"It is ludicrous that it's a crime to trespass at Fort Benning but not to teach people torture and murder," says Charles Carney of the Eighth Day Center for Justice in Chicago, one of the arrested demonstrators.

Since 1994, Representative Joseph Kennedy (D-MA) has sponsored legislation to close the school. For information on how to get involved, write Carol Richardson, School of the Americas Watch, P.O. Box 3330, Columbus, GA 31903, or call 706-682-5369.

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But don't close this school
The statistics are startling. Of all residents in St. Agatha's Parish in North Lawndale on Chicago's West Side, 48 percent live below the poverty level and 55 percent of teenagers drop out of high school. But that's what makes the next statistic even more startling—100 percent of the children involved in St. Agatha Family Empowerment (SAFE), the parish's after-school program, end up graduating from high school and going to college or getting a job.

SAFE is St. Agatha's answer to gang and drug problems in North Lawndale, the community with the highest murder rate in Chicago. It not only offers children a litany of activities (sports, choir, theater, tutoring) but also enlists teenagers to plan and run the activities, teaching them leadership and responsibility.

Last summer, their African Drum and Dance Corps performed at the opening of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, and the church choir performs all over the city. To learn more, contact the director, Katherine Harris, at SAFE, 3147 West Douglas Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60623, or 312-522-1354.

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Follow the money
Interested in expressing your disgust over legislation that blatantly favors special-interest contributors, and campaign coffers that are wealthier than some Third World nations? In the Midwest, Catholics and Quakers have joined together to make their collective voices heard in Washington.

Social-action directors in the dioceses of Cleveland, Akron, Cincinnati, and Chicago are working with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to coordinate a project called Dollars and Democracy: The Search for the Common Good.

The project involves organizing 300 group discussions in the three metropolitan areas in 1997 about how the campaign-finance system should be reformed. Some meetings will take place in the parishes, some at Quaker meetings, and some jointly.

"Within a year, we hope to have mobilized several thousand people to be able to articulate clearly opinions on how campaign finance can be reformed," says Michael McConnell of the AFSC in "Work inProgress."

To learn more about the project, contact the Chicago Archdiocese's Office of Peace and Justice, P.O. Box 1979, Chicago, IL 60690, or call 312-751-8316.

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Ready for prime time
Local library hours and Wayne and Garth aren't the only things on public-access cable television. Since 1991, the Justice and Peace Advisory Council, an independent group within the Syracuse diocese, has produced a social-justice program for the local cable station.

"Social Justice Hour" airs on Wednesdays from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m., competing with "The Nanny" and "Coach" with topics such as the bombing of Hiroshima, hunger, and homosexuality. The show features a half-hour video on a social-justice topic, which cohosts Joe Coudriet and Amy Fleming introduce and then discuss afterward. Many of the tapes come from the U.S. Catholic Conference.

The show is videotaped in the basement of Coudriet's church, Our Lady of Good Counsel in Endicott, New York. They tape 10 to 12 new shows a year. "We're not the most professional thing around, but we are the only ones talking about social justice on television," Coudriet says. For more information, call him at 607-785-3097.

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Walk in my shoes
If legislators who are deciding the fate of welfare programs had a firsthand look at what it is like to survive on public assistance, maybe they would be more compassionate.

That's the idea behind "Walk a Mile in My Shoes," a new program at Central Ohio Technical College through which lawmakers spend a day with students who are on welfare. One-third of these students have had to drop out of school over the past year because new welfare regulations require them to work at least 20 hours a week to receive benefits.

This makes it impossible for a single mother to raise children and stay in school, according to Deb Zabloudil, director of the college's Pathways program for students who receive welfare.

So far, legislative aides for U.S. Senators John Glenn and Mike DeWine have participated, as well as a state senator and county commissioner. Zabloudil says they are planning another tour this summer. Call Pathways at 614-366-9445.

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Serving size: $1 million
How did 5,400 churches nationwide end up raising more than $1 million to fight hunger on Super Bowl Sunday this year? Who started this "Souper Bowl" program? Why do Packer fans consider cheese a fashion statement?

Winners, in its finite wisdom, can only answer the first two questions. It all started with a sermon in January 1990 by Rev. Brad Smith at Spring Valley Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina.

"As we enjoy the Super Bowl," he said that Sunday, "let's be mindful of those who don't even have a bowl of soup to eat." This got the church youth group thinking.

"The kids said, 'If everyone watching the game gave a dollar to charity, think how much money could be collected,'" says church secretary Dianne Lese. "It just grew from there."

They decided to collect money from congregants in a big soup pot at the back of the church on Super Bowl Sunday. Youth groups at 22 other local churches did the same, and they sent the money to a nearby soup kitchen.

Every year since, Spring Valley has involved more churches in the Souper Bowl and raised more money. In 1993 it went national, and this year they got churches in every state to participate.

The churches can send the money raised to any charity they like. The $2.8 million collected since 1990 has gone to food banks and soup kitchens as well as Habitat for Humanity, international missions, and other charitable works.

This year there were some pretty creative fundraising efforts, according to the newsletter Souper Good News. At Eastside Catholic Parish in Elmira, New York, young people dressed in football uniforms to collect money. The youth group at Union United Methodist Church in Belleville, Illinois challenged their pastor to shave his beard if they collected 1,250 canned goods. The clippers came out at halftime.

For more information, call 800-358-SOUP.

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A lifetime opportunity
Looking for a way to donate money that will do women a world of good? The Women's Opportunity Fund helps women around the globe lift themselves from chronic poverty by providing loans and training to start small businesses.

The fund operates locally in developing countries as Trust Banks, in which 25 to 30 women unite to guarantee each others' loans. Through an average loan of $115, a woman can start her own business and double her income. The repayment rate of the loans is 98 percent.

The Trust Bank in Barranquilla, Colombia, for instance, helped Edelmira Borrero start a basket-making business with only a $25 loan. A widow, Borrero is now able to support her 12 children.

Churches nationwide donate money regularly to the Women's Opportunity Fund from their weekly collections or special fundraisers, but so far no Catholic churches have donated.

If you'd like your parish to be the first, or to learn more, call 800-7-WEWILL.

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Make it a union summer
Got any plans this summer? Instead of summer vacation and summer reunions, why not have a Union Summer?

The AFL-CIO sponsors Union Summer, a month-long program for students, community activists, and rank-and-file workers to get involved in union organizing. Last year, some of the Union Summer organizers supported sweatshop workers in New York City by demanding that owners pay their back wages; helped organize strawberry pickers in Watsonville, California; and assisted resort workers in Hilton Head, South Carolina with negotiating their first contract.

This year, up to 800 people will work at about a dozen sites nationwide. Participants will receive a weekly stipend and free housing and transportation.

For more information, call Liann Ainsworth at 800-952-2550.

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Day runs for two weeks
Jack McHale at St. Mary's Church in Fairfax, Virginia was disappointed that "Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story" got so little local attention.

So McHale took matters into his own hands. By the time he was finished, he not only ended up getting a local theater to show it but raised money for a Catholic Worker community in the process.

After convincing the theater to run the movie for a week, he arranged with a restaurant to serve a spaghetti dinner that Sunday. Then he invited people from nearby parishes to attend the dinner and movie for $10, with proceeds going to the Catholic Worker.

McHale publicized the film by faxing a flier to all parishes in the area and spreading the word through local social-justice ministers.

When more than 1,000 people attended the movie that week, the theater extended it for another week. Meanwhile, $2,100 was raised for the Catholic Worker house.

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Connecting in the community
No one could accuse community activists at St. Joseph the Worker Parish in Marrero, Louisiana of being single-issue organizers.

Whatever problems they are dealing with—crime, housing, pollution, or unemployment—they look at the broader picture. "It's all interconnected," says Father Paul McQuillen, S.S.E., the pastor. "Violence is related to education, and education is related to jobs. So you have to look at it in a multifaceted way."

Besides working to alleviate violence by getting police to patrol high-crime areas, they work on improving area schools and help operate an employment program. "We are looking for systemic and structural change, not incidental change."

Their efforts have been successful. When area children began getting sick recently from gases released by nearby chemical plants, parishioners mobilized the community.

After holding public meetings, talking to local officials, and getting plenty of television coverage, the companies agreed to tighten controls on emissions, and officials are now conducting more inspections.

Another reason for their success is networking. Four years ago, the parish joined a community-organizing network of 60 churches and synagogues in the New Orleans area.

For more information, call Father Paul McQuillen at 504-347-8438.

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The prime mover delivers
Sometimes charities have to break the rules. And sometimes those that do are the most successful in serving people.

My Brother's Keeper is one such group. Started by Jim and Terry Orcutt in the basement of their home in Brockton, Massachusetts in 1988, the organization gives away furniture and food to needy families.

What's unique about the organization is that there are no prerequisites for service—no forms to fill out, no questions to answer about income or family situation.

People only need to give their names and addresses and tell what they need. Jim Orcutt says he is never concerned about people taking advantage of them.

When they give out Thanksgiving food baskets, for example, groups often call them for the names of their recipients, to make sure people aren't calling other charities and getting more than one basket.

Orcutt says they refuse to share their list. "I tell them we will only cross-reference if our joint goal is that everyone gets two, not that no one gets two. They think I'm crazy, but we are not here to be bean counters; we're here to serve. Everything we give comes from the Lord, so we are entrusted to give as much as we can."

Since it started, My Brother's Keeper has helped more than 6,000 families with free beds, cribs, tables, lamps, and bags of food. It now operates out of a 6,000 square-foot warehouse and has a volunteer list of 600 people.

"When the family thanks us for the furniture," Orcutt says, "we hand them a wooden crucifix and tell them, 'We're just the delivery people. This is the person who sent you the furniture.'"

For more information, contact: Jim and Terry Orcutt, My Brother's Keeper, P.O. Box 3552, Brockton, MA 02404-3552, or call 508-580-1513.

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I'm too sexy for sweatshops
Undergrads at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota have given new meaning to the term "model student."

During the nationwide protest against the Gap for using sweatshop labor, students at St. Kate's wanted to show their disapproval in a different way. So they held a mock fashion show.

During lunch one day outside the dining hall, the students played music and walked down a runway wearing Gap clothes with large price tags bearing slogans such as "90 cents an hour is not a living wage" and "Made by slave labor."

Hundreds of students saw the show, and 120 sent letters to the Gap asking them to adopt fair labor practices. All of them received responses. Later Gap representatives visited the school twice.

"We realized that we are the target demographic for the Gap. That's why we got their attention," says H. Anne Nicholson, one of the organizers. For more information, call her at 612-724-4536.

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Learn religion by nature
In the Archdiocese of Cleveland, Catholic junior-high students are getting together with Jewish students to explore the religious roots of environmentalism, through a program called the Interfaith Council on the Environment.

"In the first two years, we had the students doing science projects," says coor-dinator Javier Badillo of the four-year-old program, "but that didn't work so well."

The students never finished the projects, he says, and they had trouble seeing the religious connection. Now Badillo takes the students on a walk through forests or fields, and then they discuss what they see.

"The students get to see what the environment is like and also what should not be there—like old autos and helium balloons and other trash."

The discussions often include exchanges about each others' religions, and the activity ends with a Native American ritual called the prayer of directions. For more information, call Javier Badillo at 216-696-6525.

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An antidote to violence
Administrators at Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, California were alarmed two years ago when they realized that 88 percent of charity-care patients in the emergency room were victims of violence.

Instead of just continuing to pay to treat the injuries resulting from this violence, the staff decided to put some money into preventing it.

The result is their Violence Prevention Program. Now when there are patients in the emergency room who may be gang members, the staff offers them the opportunity to talk to a former gang member about leaving the gang.

The hospital also organizes community activities that increase awareness of violence, such as a theater program that educates children about the impact of violence in their lives.

In 1995, Holy Cross Medical Center worked with the Los Angeles Times to create an antiviolence curriculum for school children in grades five through eight. The program has been used in more than 400 classrooms.

Holy Cross also belongs to a violence-prevention coalition with other organizations around Los Angeles. For further information, contact: Sister Colleen Settles, O.P., Providence Health Systems, 501 South Buena Vista, Burbank, CA 91505 or 818-238-2807.

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The host with the most
When eucharistic minister Rose Ann Dunning makes a home visit with the sick or elderly in the parish, she cases the joint. But she's looking for valuable clues, not valuable goods.

Dunning's parish, Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, has integrated eucharistic ministry with its social ministry.

While they are delivering Communion, she and the 15 other eucharistic ministers spend time talking with their clients and look around to make sure their health is not deteriorating and that they are taking care of themselves. If necessary, they refer them to proper social services, directly or through the parish social minister, Carmelia Fury.

"All the clients are either ill or elderly, and I can put them in touch with hospice care or Meals on Wheels or any other agencies that can help them," Dunning says.

For information about how this ministry works, contact Carmelia Fury, 601 Bridge Street, Ellwood City, PA 16117. Call 412-758-3465.

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Pay for war no more
The IRS decided to make an example of longtime war tax resisters Elizabeth Gravalos and Arthur Harvey last summer, seizing and auctioning off their house and blueberry farm in Hartford, Maine.

First, the bad news: they lost one blueberry lot (they lease two others) and a wood lot. But the good news is that no one bid on their house at the first silent auction in June.

Friends and members of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC), also located in Maine, had previously walked around the local area asking people not to bid on the property.

"We tried to let people know that there are conscientious objectors out there who are willing to make a stand," says Karen Marysdaughter, director of NWTRCC, "even at the risk of losing their property and the comfort of their families."

At the second auction in July, with the minimum bid on the house lowered to $7,900, there were two bids. The highest bid was from Gravalos' mother, so they get to keep their house.

The good news is also all the local and national support they have gotten from those who showed up at rallies and sent letters of support to the IRS--even from a few members of their parish, St. Philip's in Auburn.

To learn more about NWTRCC, write Karen Marysdaughter at P.O. Box 774, Monroe, ME 04951, or call 207-525-7774.

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Hope takes root
Beauty, trust, and community pride have grown in two Detroit neighborhoods where there was once barrenness, mistrust, and divisiveness, all through the help of an organic community-gardening project called Hope Takes Root.

Organized by Day Catholic Worker House and the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the two gardens in the Briggs and Jefferies communities were developed with a $1,500 grant from the United States Catholic Conference.

The sisters taught gardening and composting to local project members, who enjoyed their first crop of produce this year, grown for themselves and other families in the community.

"Our work is bringing a bit more life into our neighborhood," says Sister Elizabeth Walters, I.H.M., the project coordinator. "It's the call of the Christian faith to awaken the area's beauty and make what was like a ghost town more livable."

To find out more, contact Sister Elizabeth Walters, Day House, 2640 Trumbull Avenue, Detroit, MI 48216. Or call 313-963-4539.

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