At UUCC, our mission includes Justice in Action. We strive to actively live the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism. We engage with the community within the congregation and outside the congregation, often in partnership with local and national organizations to make our voice and actions stronger. We are passionate about the environment, climate urgency, racial justice,  social justice, voters’ rights, nurturing youth and the disenfranchised, while recognizing and embracing the intersectionality of of these issues.

We donate money to nonprofits in our community through our Sunday morning collections.

Strategic Goal 3. Intersectional Justice:

Engage more members in justice work that makes our community more equitable, inclusive and resilient.

Relevant Definitions:

Justice
Justice is the fair and equitable distribution of wealth, opportunities, rights, and political power within a community. A justice approach focuses on making things right, rather than on retribution and punishment. Justice creates conditions in which multi-dimensional wholeness and happiness can be experienced free from unnecessary fear and all members are physically and psychologically safe and secure.

Justice Work 
Actions the congregation takes to achieve equitable conditions. Justice work focuses on the institutions and structures that directly and indirectly allocate opportunities and resources. Justice work includes direct service, education, witness, advocacy and community organizing.

Justice Work with an Intersectional Lens
Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989 to illustrate how discrimination can occur at the intersections of minority group memberships, e.g. that a Black woman may experience discrimination not experienced by white women or Black men. Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where structural oppressions intersect and increase/magnify injustice. “We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality, or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts.[Crenshaw 2/20/2020]” Justice work should proceed with an intersectional lens rather than approach one form of discrimination at the expense of another. Some people call justice work with an intersectional lens “Intersectional Justice”.

Community Within: Our congregational community at UUCC

Community Without: the larger community to which we are connected-neighborhood, cities, northeast Ohio, and beyond

Equity: the Race Matters Institute describes, “The route to achieving equity will not be accomplished through treating everyone equally. It will be achieved by treating everyone equitably, or justly according to their circumstances.”  Racial equity results when you cannot predict advantage or disadvantage by race. But the route to achieving equity will not be accomplished through treating everyone equally. It will be achieved by treating everyone equitably, or justly according to their circumstances.

Inclusive: Aiming to provide equal access to opportunities and resources for people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized, such as those having physical or intellectual disabilities or belonging to other minority groups.  Oxford dictionary

Resilient: Resilience is typically defined as the capacity to recover from difficult life events.

“It’s your ability to withstand adversity and bounce back and grow despite life’s downturns,” says Amit Sood, MD, the executive director of the Global Center for Resiliency and Well-Being, creator of the Resilient Option program, and former professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Community resilience refers to the ability of groups of people to respond to and recover from adverse situations, such as natural disasters, acts of violence, economic hardship, and other challenges to their community.