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True Reflections: Summer in The District
Coming off of a semester that I was less then satisfied with this past spring, I knew that I wanted to try to apply myself over my summer break as opposed to merely do some run-of-the-mill activity....
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To Bring the Homeless Poor Into Your Home
Last Yom Kippur, I spoke on the faith community of our town’s response to the growing number of homeless families. Through our Interfaith Council, we are attempting to create a Family Promise Network....
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Building Sukkot for Ourselves and Others
Somehow, it always seems to rain on Sukkot. The week before the holiday usually falls during the first nice days of fall— this year my housemate packed away her summer clothes this past weekend, and I...
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Healing from the Past, Preparing for the Future
Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech Ha’olam, hagomel li-chayavim tovot shegamalni kol tov. Blessed are You, Eternal, our God, King of the universe who bestows goodness upon the accountable, who has...
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Fighting Poverty with Faith
Every day, congregations serve individuals in need within our communities. We run soup kitchens, partner with the Interfaith Housing Network to provide shelter for the homeless in our synagogues and...
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Joined in Partnership, United in Prayer
Yesterday morning I had the privilege of attending an interfaith home blessing for the SeVerna Apartments, an affordable housing project near the Capitol Building. The event started off with an...
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Reform Movement Tells Congress: Deficit Reduction Must Not Increase Poverty
Yesterday the Religious Action Center sent a letter to all Members of Congress urging them to protect the poor in any deficit reduction agreement. As the end of year approaches and we near the “fiscal...
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Join the Chorus: Fight for a Living Wage
For the second weekend in a row, I have spent my time at a hotel outside of Washington, D.C. with over 200 high school students at the RAC’s L’Taken Social Justice Seminar. Over the course of four...
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Disability Rights Rundown
Did you know it only costs $6000 per year to support a person with a disability in integrated housing? (Compare that to the tens of thousands it costs to house a person in an institution). This year...
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Every Number Has a Face: What Friday’s Sequester Really Means
On Purim we read about Esther And how Haman’s plot didn’t best her But this year there’s more Evil plotting in store As we worry about the sequester. –Rabbi Joe Black 3 days until sequestration....
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A Menu of Social Justice
Rabbi Michael Namath, Program Director here at the RAC, tells a story to our L’Taken students: One day, as a few people were walking by the riverside, they saw babies floating down the river. Several...
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Beating the Heat on the Street
Memorial Day marks the kick-off of summer, with Americans breaking out their grills, bathing suits and white pants. But it also means the start of a difficult season for the thousands of homeless...
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Taking to the Streets for LGBT Rights Gains a New Meaning
This Saturday hundreds of people will take to the D.C. streets for the annual Capital Pride Parade. But each night, hundreds of thousands of LGBT youth take to the streets because they have nowhere...
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Enough is Enough! (A.K.A. Why Should I Care about the “Sequester,” Anyway,...
Are you still confused about this thing called the “sequester”? What is “non-defense discretionary spending” anyway? And how do they actually affect your life? NDD United, a national coalition of...
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Happy Canada Day!
Today marks the 146th anniversary of the British North America Act, which, in 1867, united Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Province of Canada (divided into upper and lower Canada), forming the...
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Making Homes Affordable: Funding for the American Dream
For the last few weeks now, I have been working as the Operations Intern at the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC). In this position, I get to see everything that is going on around the...
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Enough With the Bare Minimum: It’s Time for a Living Wage
Did you know that there is not a single state in the United States in which a person earning minimum wage, working 40 hours a week can afford a two-bedroom apartment? A person earning the federal...
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Sukkot Inspires Awareness of Climate Refugees
Sukkot is one of the most festive holidays we observe in the Jewish religion. Sukkot often involves the enjoyable and often communal activity of decorating a sukkah, the song and dance of shaking the...
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Those Still Wandering…
On Sukkot we build sukkahs to remember the temporary dwellings our ancestors lived in during their 40 years of wandering in the desert. This wandering is a crucial part of our history, but for a lucky...
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Typhoon Haiyan Calls for Action on Climate Change
When faced with catastrophe and war, we are quick to recall Leviticus 19: “Do not stand idly by while your neighbor bleeds.” This Jewish teaching led us to rally for stronger laws to prevent gun...
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2013 UNFCCC: United Nations Framework “Change in Climate Conversation”
“We must stop calling events like [Typhoon Haiyan] as natural disasters. It is not natural when people continue to struggle to eradicate poverty and pursue development and gets battered by the...
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Rep. Ryan’s Budget: Housing for People Living in Poverty Gets Worse
After years of neglect and cuts to the federal budget, a growing number of low-income people face unaffordable housing costs. Federal housing programs have proven effective in enabling millions of...
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Reform CA: In the Field Choosing Our Next Campaign
By Rabbi Stephanie Kolin What has Reform CA been up to recently? Over the past few months, the Reform CA Leadership Team and many talented congregational point people have been researching and...
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Justice, Holidays and Housing
In the last few weeks, stories about American Indian issues have been prevalent in the media, including the prosecution of domestic violence under the Violence Against Women Act, the expansion of...
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Wander No More: Reform CA’s Campaign for Affordable Homes in California
By Rabbi Stef Kolin Everyone in California needs a safe and affordable place to call home. Rents and mortgages within the reach of working families are critical to the moral integrity of our state and...
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Mental Health Awareness Month: Working Towards a Roof Over Everyone’s Head
This blog is part of an on-going series about the intersection of mental health and other crucial Jewish social justice issues during Mental Health Awareness Month. For more posts, click here. At...
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Reform CA Lobby Day: Do Your Congregations Build Affordable Housing?
By Rabbi Stephanie Kolin On Monday, June 2, 2014, nearly 30 Reform CA leaders from all across California, descended on the Capitol building in Sacramento. We started our morning at Congregation B’nai...
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Crying Out Against Homelessness
By Rabbi Benjamin Zeidman A couple weeks ago, my son turned one year old. Before he was born I thought I knew what it meant to worry about the future. Now, I realize that “naïve” is a nice way to...
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The “Right” Action to Take in Aiding the Homeless
Years ago homelessness was only found on the streets of cities, a phenomenon hidden from rural and suburban towns. However with a population of over 3.5 million people per year, homelessness is an...
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Helping the Poor One Relationship at a Time
We recently became a host congregation for our local Family Promise affiliate, Greenville Area Interfaith Hospitality Network. Our involvement with an interfaith hospitality network has afforded our...
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Not Everyone Has a Sukkah To Call Home
This week, Jews around the world will be building sukkot (the plural of sukkah, a temporary three-walled shelter commemorating the booths or huts the Israelites built in the desert) to celebrate the...
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How Bigotry and Legalized Discrimination Fuel an Epidemic of LGBT Homelessness
“When I transitioned, I transitioned into poverty.” This statement by Ruby Corado, a transgender woman who founded a Bilingual Multicultural Drop Inn-Community Center for vulnerable LGBT individuals,...
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Ensuring That A Permanent Home Is Not a Prerequisite to Voting
This week, we will read Parashat Noach, which tells the story of Noah and the flood. In this parashah (Torah portion), as the flood came upon the Earth over the course of seven days, Noah and his...
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New Report is a Call to Action to End Child Homelessness
A recent comprehensive state-by-state report sponsored by the National Center on Family Homelessness at American Institutes for Research shows that the number of homeless children in the country has...
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Helping Those Experiencing Homelessness as the Weather Gets Colder
Last month, Weather.com reported that there was record breaking November Arctic Cold weather, full of cold surges and record-breaking low temperatures. There may be global warming, but that does not...
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Looking Back to Move Forward: What We Can Learn from 2014 on Economic Justice
While we have seen some positive changes in the economy – such as November’s jobs growth pace of 321,000 jobs a month – the Economic Policy Institute estimates that it will take at least two years...
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Removing the Stumbling Block of Economic Inequality
It is essential for activists who are passionate about disability rights to understand how many of the inequalities and hardships that people in America face uniquely impact people with disabilities....
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Homelessness in the Trans Youth Community: What Do We Know? What Can We Do?
Despite the small percentage of the overall population that identifies as LGBT, approximately forty percent of homeless youth served by homelessness agencies are LGBT. This disturbing number reflects...
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As Snow Covers the Northeast, Keeping Those Experiencing Homelessness In Mind
Though I did live in Atlanta for the first few years of my life, the majority of my winters have been spent in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And in Boston, we are used to snow; despite my...
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Short-Term Shelter, Long-Term Respect
Last month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development released new guidelines which call on single-sex emergency shelters and other facilities to “place a potential client (or current client...
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Ending Child Poverty: The Way Forward
Child poverty is a national crisis that must be addressed. In the United States, there are 14.7 million poor children and 6.5 million extremely poor children. This means that the number of poor...
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This Passover, We are Guiding People Home
By Lara Pukatch and Rebecca Koppel As Passover approaches, Jews remember that we were once slaves, forced into backbreaking labor and oppressed by the Egyptian pharaohs. Our escape from bondage came...
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The Modern Plagues of Inequality
On Passover, we remember the ten plagues that were put upon the Egyptian people. Thousands of years later, modern-day plagues of inequality should ignite contemporary responses to combat these...
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Prepping for Consultation on Conscience: Advocacy 101
We’re excited to welcome our Consultation on Conscience participants to Washington, D.C. in just over a week! In addition to briefings with public policy decision makers and the Reform Movement’s own...
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At the Consultation: Hear From Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
On April 26-28, hundreds of Reform Jews will gather in Washington, D.C. for the RAC’s Consultation on Conscience, the Reform Movement’s flagship social justice event. This year’s Consultation will...
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Appropriating to Meet Our Values
With the budget process moving along, the appropriations process also kicks in. Budget season allows for the president and the two chambers of Congress to lay out their priorities vis-à-vis funding...
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Marking Mental Health Awareness Month
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, a time to raise awareness of mental illnesses and the importance of mental wellness for all. In our own country, an estimated 18.6 percent or 43.7 million...
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Protect Affordable Housing for all Seasons and for all Situations
The record-breaking floods over the past week in Houston sadly remind us all of the fragility of our homes and refuges in the face of extreme weather. Many homes were destroyed in the severe flooding...
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A Place to Call Home
This week in Congress, the House voted approved the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies (THUD) funding bill for Fiscal Year 2016, which passed 216-210. Though the bill...
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Capital of Economic Inequality?
Last July, I packed up all of my bags, loaded up the trunk of my dad’s car, and made the trek from New England to move to Washington D.C. and begin my post-collegiate professional life. While I’ve...
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