What’s New in Faith In ActionWhen I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist. — Dom Helder Camara NewsSign Your Faith Community onto Child Nutrition Letter (Deadline July 29)Faith-based organizations are signing on to letter to Joshua DuBois, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, asking for presidential leadership on child nutrition reauthorization. If you are connected to a faith community, please urge them to quickly sign on to the letter. You can use our new Outreach Action Sheet to brief others in your churches and communities about what is at stake. The deadline for sign-ons is Thursday July 29, 2010. To sign on, please email Robert Francis at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America at Robert.Francis@elca.org. Check Out Helpful Tax Credit Resources from Bread for the WorldAs part of RESULTS' Economic Opportunity for All campaign that focuses on protecting poverty-reduction provisions like the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, we wanted to highlight some important resources from our friends at Bread for the World. First, please see Bread's Faith Reflections on Anti-Poverty Tax Policy, which include a set of principles on national tax policy that would (RESULTS supports these principles):
In addtion, Bread has created an informative and inspiring VIDEO (also right) on this issue to help educate their grassroots. Watch the video to learn more about tax policy and poverty and plan to seek out Bread volunteers in your community to work together to build support for these policies in 2010. Finally, Monica Mills, Director of Government Relations for Bread for the World, was our guest speaker for the February 13 RESULTS Domestic national conference call. You can listen to a recording of the call on our national conference call page. RESULTS “Turning the Ship” Faith-Based Curriculum MaterialsRESULTS has a newly created outreach and engagement tool for faith communities. RESULTS “Turning the Ship” faith-based curriculum is a multi-week study focused on social justice, advocacy and religion. RESULTS core values serve as a template for the study providing an excellent resource for congregations looking to get more involved in advocacy around hunger and poverty. This study can also serve as a great tool for outreach to faith communities about RESULTS and our work. Anyone is welcomed to download the curriculum from our Resources section below and use it in your local congregations. If you have any questions, please contact the Faith in Action Team: Jos Linn, Lisa Marchal and Crickett Nicovich. (Please note: These downloads are all MS Word documents)
FIA Action InsertsThe RESULTS Faith in Action Team will be posting action items here for you to use. Actions listed below are the most current actions needed. Faith communities are free to copy and paste them or download a Word version for use in newsletters and bulletins. GENERATE MEDIA SUPPORTING WORKING FAMILIESOver the last few years, we’ve been bombarded with information about how to rescue our economy from the recent financial collapse. But a fundamental question has been ignored throughout this process — what kind of economy do we want to create? Or more importantly, what kind of values do we hold dear and how can we shape our economy to fulfill them? We’ve watched the bailout and rescues of big banks and insurance companies. But how is Congress helping families — and especially their children — impacted by the recession that these corporate giants helped cause? The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the 2009 economic recovery bill, made significant investments in American families by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC). These credits encourage work, promote responsibility and help keep millions of low-income working families out of poverty. But these ARRA expansions expire at the end of 2010. We need Congress to make these expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit permanent before this year is over. TAKE ACTION: Congress will be debating the tax bill in September and it’s critical that we make our voices heard. Generating media in support of working families by submitting an op-ed or letter to the editor to your local paper. See the RESULTS Domestic Action sheet for more information. WRITE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR FOR THE GLOBAL FUNDIn a speech before the United Nations General Assembly last year, President Obama declared, “We will support the Millennium Development Goals and approach next year's summit with a global plan to make them a reality.” As part of that plan, advocates and congressional leaders are calling on the president to come to the MDG Summit this September with a commitment to contribute $6 billion over three years to the Global Fund. We know that the Global Fund has helped save 5.7 million lives since 2003, and 101 members of the House recently voiced their support to the president for this kind of commitment. Investing in the Global Fund is a compassionate, wise move, so write a letter to the editor today calling on the president to support the Global Fund! TAKE ACTION: To write a letter through the RESULTS website, go to our Media Guide to take action. If your letter gets published, amplify its impact by sending a copy of your published letter to your members of Congress. |