Social Justice 3-5 year vision

Since the Parish is working on its 3-5 year pastoral plan we discussed our vision at last Saturday's Social Justice Committee meeting. While there are many worthy projects and needs we agreed to focus our limited resources in order to be effective. We will continue to be responsive to local concerns that are brought to us by the Diocese, the Silverton community, parishioneers and social justice committee members but will put a priority on those needs and issues which have a champion on the committee.

At our meeting we also agreed to focus Direct Service, Education and Advocacy on the issues of Immigration Reform, the War in Iraq and Health Care.

In addition to this focus, our goal is a sustainable committee (i.e. committee members are renewed by their involvement rather than having all their life forces sucked dry trying to respond to every possible social concern.)

We would also like to see opportunities for several levels of involvement in social justice issues.
We hope to use a variety of means to engage parishioneers and the community on social concerns. At one level we would like to build a simple e-mail list to provide notices of direct service and advocacy opportunities. We would also like to educate using creative and engaging forums (e.g., a movie night.) We continue to meet in a public place (9am 4th Saturday at Not your Mama's Coffee) to make it easier for the community to participate in our meetings and for coffee dependent committee members to get their fix.

[Photo of May 1, 2007 immigration (and small anti-immigrant) rally at state Capitol]