California Council of Churches
Follow Us, Like Us, Write Us
  • Home
  • CCC Blog
  • About & Contact
    • Staff & Board of Directors
    • Contact Us
  • Current Issues
    • Civil Rights
    • Economic Justice
    • Health Care
    • Marriage Equality
    • Peace & Justice
    • Religious Liberty
    • Resources & Study Guides
  • Support Our Work
    • Car Donations
  • Church IMPACT
  • Financial Coaching

California Council of Churches Lead Petitioner Urging U.S. Supreme Court to Uphold Marriage Equality

3/30/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
The California Council of Churches has long been the largest faith-based organization in California actively working to achieve full equality and rights for all God's children, including our LGBTQ sisters and brothers.  We have filed many Amicus Briefs in support of marriage equality in state and federal courts.  Thanks to the ever-brilliant Eric Alan Isaacson, the brief he submitted on our behalf to the US Supreme Court last week is quoted in the article below.

May justice and equality prevail for ALL God's children!!


How Marriage Equality Opponents' Arguments Are Getting Turned Against Them
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/03/13/3632995/children-religious-liberty-tradition-supreme-court-marriage-equality/

 
To read the full brief: http://www.supremecourt.gov/ObergefellHodges/AmicusBriefs/14-556_California_Council_of_Churches.pdf
    


0 Comments

Read the March 2015 issue of Justice Seekers here!

3/30/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture


Read the March 2015 issue of Justice Seekers here!


https://www.votervoice.net/CALCHURCHES/newsletters/17965

0 Comments

Introducing Kendra Noel Lewis and the Impact of Each and Every Gift: Benevolence  

3/25/2015

1 Comment

 
Picture
  
To fold the hands in prayer is well, to open them in charity is better. ~French Proverb

Life is definitely a journey.  For so many of us, we go down many different paths in hopes that we get to our final destination.   The career path has its own path and often times can be the most troublesome.   I am very lucky because I feel I was called to do what I love to do and have had and currently feel lucky every day that I get to work for an organization that has an awesome mission, great staff and wonderful work environment.  Let me introduce myself, my name is Kendra Noel Lewis and I am currently the Director of Communications and Development for the California Council of Churches and California IMPACT. 
 
For 19 years, I can honestly say, that I have been working in my dream career doing what I love.  What do I do?  I am a professional fundraiser.  When asked what I do and I decide to be coy, my response is "I beg for a living."  I usually get a big laugh.  Most people would prefer to jump in a shark tank then ask another individual for one penny.  I don't see it that way at all.  I find benevolence both fascinating and wonderful all at the same time.  I see my job as the opportunity to meet individuals and grantors and pair them with a mission, program or project that they strongly believe.   Or I am a part of the ongoing stewardship once the individual or grantor has decided to make the donation.   According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics, "Giving by individuals makes up the vast majority of contributions received by nonprofit organizations."  Giving USA 2013 estimates that individual giving amounted to $228.93 billion in 2012, an increase of 3.9 percent in current dollars (1.9%, adjusted for inflation) from 2011. This accounts for 72 percent of all contributions received.  What is incredible about this statistic is that this information captures the $5 gift and the $5 million dollar gift. 

 
For me, it is the act of giving and not the amount that is so very important.  It is because of gifts large and small that an organization like Cal Churches and IMPACT are able to do the incredible social justice work for many throughout California and how our work is an influence on the national level as well.  If you are a receiving this newsletter and you are a donor, let me say Thank You!  Thank you for your support, your dedication to our mission and each time we ask, you find a way to share and make a difference in the lives of others.  This is the joy of the work that I do.  I am very excited to be working for an amazing organization and with brilliant minds like Rick and Libby.  Through the newsletter, I am looking forward to getting to connect with many of you.  

 
It is truly a pleasure to be a part of an organization that for decades has taken on the task of standing up as a voice and advocate for justice for all.  How lucky we are that so many of you have joined us year after year with your dedicated support.   The impact of each and every single gift is evident our ability to demand justice for health care, marriage equality, civil rights, economic social justice and immigrant rights just to name a few.   And we still have plenty more work to do. 

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
  
~ Horace Mann  

1 Comment

Deny, Deny, Deny: Justice or a Zero-Sum Game?

3/25/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
                                                            by Elizabeth Sholes, Director of Public Policy  

There is a wonderful parable in our tradition: Stone Soup.  Many of you know it, but in case not, it is the story of a town under siege that is running out of food.  One household has a handful of barley. Another neighbor has a bit of chicken.  Someone else has some carrots, one family has onions.  No one has enough, and they are scared. 
 

In the midst of the worry, an old woman drags her huge kettle into the town square, fills it with water, puts it on the fire and drops three small stones into it.  People come out of their homes and ask her what she's doing.  She replies that she is making Stone Soup.  As she's stirring the heating water and three stones, she says to a bystander, "It would taste even better if you added your onions - they're not feeding you anyway."  To others she invites them to put in their meager bits, and soon everyone is adding what they have until suddenly they have- soup!  Soup for everyone, man, woman, and child, and they are saved.
 

That is a foundational principle of our faith - sharing what we have so all have what they need. However, too many read this parable as "SOCIALISM!!" or worse, some kind of theft.  Really?
 
 
In a complex society, we pass legislation and allocate tax budgets so we can support one another in many ways.  We are past the days of tribal society and are too big to depend on personal charity and actions alone. But unlike Stone Soup, some have come to see this Soup Kettle of public money as a loss to themselves, not a benefit to all.  We begrudge the funds and hoard them, even though the bits won't support us individually on their own any more than the wilted carrots alone could support the hungry in the parable.
 
California Council of Churches and California Church IMPACT do public policy work through both education and advocacy to pass laws and budgets that will sustain programs that serve those in need.  What we don't always see is how poorly they can work because the justice of providing dependable food, shelter, health care, and other services for those in need has been characterized as taking something from us as taxpayers. At the foundation of the inefficiency lies the antagonism to 'stone soup;.
 
Good stewardship over our public resources is essential, but we have returned to the mindset of  Victorian overseers who brutalized those in poverty from a kind of Social Darwinism view of the 'deserving' vs. 'undeserving' poor.  We still hear screeches about fraud and abuse when strict audits of programs show almost none exists.  We call out the 'Welfare Queen", surely racial as well as class fearmongering, and we demand harsh reviews of people's personal morality from drug testing to invasive reviews of their sex lives all so they can obtain the bare minimum supports for their lives. Audits show that recipients of public support are actually far less likely to be drug users or practitioners of unfettered free love than the rest of us. Facts make no difference
 
In several counties where federally-funded SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Access Program - known as CalFresh here) funds are available, applications result in "deny, deny, deny" then maybe enrolled. Administrative obstruction is designed to discourage people.  It works. SNAP costs the state and counties nothing other than administrative processing, but the mindset that this is a 'zero sum game', that food access takes something away from citizens, has led to these benighted policies. California's enrollment is about half of all who are eligible.  That is the goal because of...well, something.  It's not even clear anymore.
 
Our advocacy cannot be simply about the poor. It cannot be soft-hearted bleatings about the 'vulnerable'.  It has to be loud, fearless, authentic clarity from us about what causes poverty in the first place.
 
People are not poor because of some huge moral failing.  They exist in an economic and societal structure that increasingly wants them poor.
 
Our state and nation must highlight the deliberate policies that favor outsourcing of jobs, shuttering plants, repressing workers' advocacy, oppressing wages, reducing hours, rejecting benefits all of which push people from self-sufficiency into poverty.  It is both the under-educated whose opportunities were blighted at birth and the formerly middle class who need help.  They are our neighbors.  They sit in our pews.  They are the salt of the earth, not the dregs of society, just trying to get by as best they can. 
 
Back in 1981 Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman asked of this renewed harshness about poverty, "Why do the rich need incentives but the poor need desperation?"  Since then both our economy and our social service system have embraced the implicit notion that providing for those whom the economy has abandoned is theft from taxpayers and must be rigidly controlled along with the recipients themselves.
 
And yet, we could have Stone Soup.  We could embrace policies that put that 'hand under the elbow' to help people rise.  We could go back to first principles of how we treat those in need.  We could be a nation that shares.   That is a choice we can make. It's up to us.

0 Comments

Join CA Council of Churches in enrolling your neighbors in health care coverage!

3/23/2015

0 Comments

 
Health Care Enrollments 2015 – CA Council of Churches Invites You to Help.

Dear Friends:

As most of you know, we have been engaged in Outreach and Education to help members of your congregations, neighborhoods, communities find out what is available in health care coverage via Covered CA health plans.

Now CCC is embarking on a new aspect of this work, applying for a Covered CA Navigator grant.

Navigators are trained certified enrollers who work with the health care Exchanges – the ‘marketplace’ where health care policies are available – to help people walk through health care options. Navigators help find what subsidies are available, help people understand who is eligible in their households and who is not (such as those on Medicare), what subsidies are offered, etc. Then the Navigator will help those applicants complete their applications.

Since congregations are the most trusted partners in any community, we are looking for those congregations that can:

- Provide people willing to be trained as Navigators who understand the complexities of the health care options in their areas;
- Have people who can help those with insurance re-apply for the next year;
- Offer space in recurring, regular NON-working hour periods such as weeknights and weekend times;
- Work closely with their communities and have outreach to underserved populations who may be employed in low-wage work’
- Have populations that qualify for Covered CA and not just Medi-Cal.

While Navigators may enroll people in Medi-Cal, our project statewide is to complete 1200 applications for insurance obtained through the Exchanges. We will have 8 months in which to do that. We need your congregation’s help achieving that goal. ONLY Covered CA completed enrollments are counted for our grant although Medi-Cal counts toward the Common Good.

Are you interested in becoming a partner with CCC to help this occur?

- CCC will make sure one or more of your congregational members or trusted allies is trained.
- CCC will be able to secure the background checks and fingerprinting at no cost to the Navigator.
- CCC will assure your Navigators or your congregations are eligible for reimbursement.

For each completed and enrolled application (what Covered CA terms an ‘effectuated application’) the Navigator or congregation will receive $58 whether the application is for an Exchange coverage or for Medi-Cal. This payment will continue as long as funds are available from the federal government.

It is critical that part of this work is reaching out to those eligible for the health care plans offered through the Exchange. That means anyone making $16,000 as an individual, or roughly $32,000 as a family would be Exchange eligible. This is a critical link in the sustainability of the whole health care provision.

We will be sending our application to Covered CA on or before July 28. We have a few congregational allies now, but we need YOU.

Please let us know as soon as possible if you are interested. There is no commitment, but it helps us see where our work needs to be. The largest pocket of those eligible for Covered CA health plans remains in Los Angeles, but everyone can participate – there are tens of thousands who still do not have any health insurance or who need new options due to life changes (births, deaths, marriage, divorce, job or income change).

This is a service you can offer your congregation, your neighbors, your community and receive income at the same time.

Please respond before the middle of the month to healthcare@calchurches.org to let us know if this is of interest to you and your congregations.

Thank you!
0 Comments

    Author

    The Rev Dr Rick Schlosser

    Archives

    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    January 2020
    September 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    February 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    July 2014

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    Civil Rights
    Economic Justice
    Elections
    Financial Coaching
    Healthcare
    Marriage Equality
    Peace & Justice
    Racism
    Religious Liberty

Website by L2Designery