Journey for Justice Alliance tells Congress it’s ‘Fairness or Else’ relating to high quality of life for all

On Thursday, Jitu Brown, nationwide director for Journey for Justice Alliance (J4J), queried individuals on the nation’s capital with questions like: “Increase your hand when you’ve ever skilled a slumlord. Increase your hand when you reside in a neighborhood the place you don’t have an honest hospital. Increase your hand when you’ve ever witnessed or skilled police brutality. Increase your hand when you reside in a neighborhood the place the grocery retailer features because the liquor retailer.” Voices raised in affirmation with every query Brown posed.

The nationwide community of dozens of intergenerational, grassroots neighborhood organizations traveled to Washington from Chicago final week on behalf of the marketing campaign Fairness or Else High quality of Life agenda, a platform centered on addressing fundamental wants for these in poverty and/or marginalized communities via coverage initiatives.

J4J kick-started the coalition in 2012 (and launched the marketing campaign in 2021) with a give attention to fairness in training. The group then reached out to different leaders and organizers from completely different quality-of-life areas (housing, well being care, atmosphere/local weather justice, youth funding and meals insecurity) to share how inequity impacts these areas and the grassroots options they’ve organized.

By sharing methods and techniques amongst each other, the alliance is stronger in numbers and vary and cooperation with extra allies on the fairness entrance to maneuver the needle relating to actual change in additional communities.

“We perceive that these closest to the ache have to be closest to the ability,” Brown mentioned. “So long as individuals that aren’t impacted by a problem get to say what the treatment to that challenge is, then there’s no readability on what’s inflicting the problem within the first place. It’s simply any person’s opinion.”

After holding a whole lot of in-person and digital listening initiatives, city halls and conversations across the nation the previous 18 months with leaders who characterize their communities to ask them, “How has racism impacted your high quality of life? And what’s your imaginative and prescient for a world the place this features accurately?” the alliance discovered that there’s a elementary perception that America has been diligent within the rhetoric of racial justice, however negligent in making a dedication to racial justice.

The results of their effort is condensed within the 16-page report, the place areas of public security, youth, economics and meals manufacturing and supply are touched upon. Calls for fall inside all the aforementioned areas of concern, together with:

• Finish lead and different dangerous chemical compounds in ingesting water via federal infrastructure funding and penalties for municipalities that proceed these practices;
• Present federal and state help for the coaching of culturally responsive doulas from the communities they serve, and for his or her providers to moms;
• Enact federal rent-control legal guidelines as an anti-gentrification technique, making state bans on hire management unlawful;
• Restore the appropriate to vote to these at present and previously incarcerated, with entry to voting/putting poll containers in all prisons/jails;
• Finish zero tolerance self-discipline practices in faculties;
• Institute youth decision-making authority on faculty boards and different governance our bodies;
• Present federal help for the creation of extra Black-owned banks;
• Institute labs and grants in faculties to help sustainable meals practices in communities (school-based gardens, and so on.), amongst different objects.

“The inspiration of any nation are the establishments that lay the construction for individuals’s growth,” Brown mentioned. “If you wish to sabotage the neighborhood, you kill its fundamental high quality of life establishments. As we perceive it, the one answer to that’s self-determination. As a result of the widespread denominator that we’ve across the nation is that we reside in communities that we don’t management. We reside in communities the place the fundamental high quality of life establishments are directed by another person. We are saying that no person can love us higher than us. And that’s why the High quality of Life Agenda.”

The Journey for Justice Alliance was joined by members of nationwide nonprofits to talk on the High quality of Life Agenda objects and ship the report back to Congress following a information convention Thursday. U.S. Reps. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., and Jesús “Chuy” García, a Chicago Democrat, and American Federation of Academics Secretary-Treasurer Fedrick Ingram endorsed the plan.

“We’ve got a lot hurt to restore which are the seeds of the start of our nation,” Bowman mentioned. “What I proceed to see is we’re manner too snug with the struggling and loss of life of some individuals, however not others. We, the USA Congress, essentially the most highly effective physique on the earth, are manner too snug with the loss of life of Black and brown individuals, with the struggling of Black and brown individuals, with the struggling and loss of life of poor individuals.

“We debate, negotiate and write laws and cross laws each single day that leaves some individuals out of the American Dream. Daily we do that and we justify it to ourselves as whether it is OK. There are locations throughout this nation the place persons are struggling and dying each single day, preventable deaths, if solely our nation and our nation cared sufficient about who they’re as individuals, who they’re as human, and general high quality of life. We’d like a brand new America that facilities life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everybody and never just a few and facilities our collective humanity.”

García agreed.

“Advancing fairness in our society requires systemic options like these advised by the coalition, not the piecemeal efforts we’ve seen fail time and time once more,” he mentioned. “We’d like long-term options and never Band-Aids and lip service. This consists of making certain that everybody in Chicagoland and throughout the nation receives a high-quality training in protected, well-equipped buildings with important wraparound help. To make that occur, we bought to lastly fund faculties equitably. That doesn’t imply all faculties get the identical funding. As a substitute, faculties with the larger want should get larger funding. That’s fairness.

“High quality of life for our neighborhood additionally means the appropriate to wash air and clear water with none caveats. High quality of life means the appropriate to reside in protected communities, free from gun violence and discriminatory policing practices that focus on Black, Latino and Indigenous communities. I’m grateful to the Fairness or Else marketing campaign for partaking with impacted communities and bringing options from these communities to the forefront.”

Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, twenty fifth, attended the Journey for Justice’s High quality of Life Competition in Washington.

“You title it, the platform speaks to the problem that we’ve seen on the bottom,” Sigcho-Lopez mentioned. “We’ve got heard from the individuals, the residents, the constituents that we talked to over time, that the time to behave is now and that’s what that is, an pressing name to do that — doing the detangle we see throughout the nation and in our neighborhood.”

“We don’t need cookie-cutter insurance policies for various communities,” mentioned Shannon Bennett, government director of the Kenwood-Oakland Group Group (KOCO). “I feel this report can function a template in our communities the place these items have been a problem for a protracted, very long time. We need to be sure that our federal representatives not solely acknowledge the problem, however work with us on options which are at a really native degree.”

Bennett traveled with KOCO members and Chicagoland nonprofit allies to attend the weekend competition.

“We’re placing individuals on discover that we are able to’t be taken as a right,” he mentioned. “This mobilization is a mobilization of power and never being pulled collectively round a specific social gathering or specific elected official. We’re doing this across the wants of our individuals to be seen and heard whose points are consistently placed on the again burner. This can be a warning shot … a collective of willingness to say: Let’s come along with our energy.”

“We wish self-determination in our communities,” Brown mentioned. “We wish the assets which are owed to our communities. What occurs once we carry these individuals collectively like we’re doing now could be we’re placing our individuals in entrance of one another to allow them to discuss to individuals who have received, as a result of these victories usually are not anomalies. They’re microcosms of what’s attainable.”

The Fairness or Else coalition consists of: The Alliance for Instructional Justice, The Heart for In style Democracy, Nationwide Alliance Towards Racist & Political Repression, Dignity in Colleges Marketing campaign, American Federation of Academics, Nationwide Training Affiliation, Urge for food for Change, Clear Water Motion, White Coats for Black Lives, Nationwide Nurses United and Black Lives Matter at College. For extra data go to www.standing4equity.org. For extra data go to www.j4jalliance.com.

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