What We Have Done

Since 1991, Sacramento ACT has been creating real, structural change in Sacramento. We have drawn on our shared faith values as we have worked to create a more just and equitable community for all.  We have lifted up voices that are often silenced in our community:  youth, communities of color, immigrants, homeless residents, new voters.

We have worked to improve education and safety in our community, to increase access to healthcare, to direct funding away from incarceration and towards eliminating homelessness and supporting human services, and to engage voters to vote their values.

How We Advance Justice

Sacramento ACT works to create a more just world by teaching people of faith how to build and exercise their own power to address the root causes of the problems they face. In ACT, this struggle for justice is rooted in our shared faith vision. We use listening, research and advocacy to identify and change conditions to create justice and equity.

To win structural change we focus on:

FAITH

Our faith is the basis for our vision of change and provides us with a unifying moral framework which demands inclusion, justice and equity for all.  

RELATIONSHIPS

We develop relationships with and among leaders to discover a shared analysis of the inequity and injustice of the world as it is as well as a shared vision of the world as it should be.  The vision of the world as it should be must be created with input from those closest to the pain.

STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

Through relationships and research, we build a structural analysis that identifies the conditions that cause the problem, as well as the role of systemic racism and economic exclusion.  We use this analysis as the foundation for our advocacy for change. 

POWER

We understand power as the ability to act.  We recognize that power is the product of relationship.  We build shared power among people, “power with” not “power over” each other.

Congregation-Based Organizing

A Moral Framework

 

Organizing begins with the radical act of imagining a different future.  Some traditions call this “prophetic imagination,” one which is inspired by the vision of a prophet.

While we imagine the world as it should be, this imagination is always informed by an understanding of the world as it is.  The reality in our community, the world as it is, is often painful for communities that have been isolated and excluded, particularly those excluded racially and economically.  It is critical to listen to the voices and experience of people closest to the pain to truly develop a picture of the world as it is and to expose injustice.

We do this through building relationships through conversations, or “one-to-ones.”  Through these conversations, a whole web of relationships is created in a community, and people find the ways that our experience intersects with others, and find that we are not alone.  Unity develops through shared experience.  Through research on the issues affecting the community, we find that our individual pain frequently has systemic and structural roots, rather than being a result of a personal moral failing.

Congregation-based organizing has the profound moral resource of offering an imagination of a different future, one of justice, freedom and equity. The scriptures and traditions of our faiths offer hope and vision for the possibility of transformation.  They empower us with imagination.

Furthermore, we are called to live out our faith commitments by working to advance justice and equity.  Each tradition offers the imagination of a just and equitable future, AND calls upon the faithful to work to make this image a reality.

Through organizing, we connect this hopeful imagination of the world as it should be with the reality of the world as it is now.  We give people tools to change the systems and structures that oppress them.  We draw on the web of relationships as the source of the power and strength to transform our community and to build racial and economic equity.

Learn more about the PICO model of congregation-based organizing here:

Faith-based Community Organizing→

Why Racial Equity?

At Sacramento ACT we seek to build the Beloved Community, following a shared faith vision of inclusion and the inherent dignity of each person.  The reality in the United States is that from income to housing, from infant mortality to life expectancy and the health of all the years in between, from education to employment, race predicts the outcome→.

Racial equity will be a reality when race no longer determines life outcomes. Thirty years from now, people of color will become the majority of the population in the United States.  All of us have a shared future and our social and economic well-being is linked. We must address racial inequity directly, in order to build a community that benefits and includes all of us.

At Sacramento ACT, beginning with the faith conviction that each human being has inherent worth and dignity, we are leading difficult conversations that work to break down racial divides.