Daniel Rodela is Faith in the Valley’s newest organizer, leading efforts to build political power in rural communities of color in Kern County. Daniel has over 20 years of experience as an ordained elder in the Seventh-day Adventist Church tradition…
A few years ago, Faith in the Valley leader Carmen Ojeda was taking an ESL class in her community of Dos Palos in Merced County when some classmates began sharing their concerns around language and involvement barriers in their children’s…
What would it take to solve the housing crisis for the Central Valley (and California as a whole)? Many of the answers are in Vienna, Austria. Since 2009, Vienna has been ranked 10 times as the most livable city in…
How can we create a better Central Valley where faith and justice can be used to help the people who need it the most? This is the question that the Rev. Dr. Frederick Douglass Haynes III—a prophetic pastor, passionate leader,…
The ordinance represents the intensifying war against unhoused people occurring all over California. “Every day someone is being swept off the road. They are being told to relocate and they are losing everything they have and being arrested.”
During the six week program, we have been working with 20 campers—ranging in age from 5 to 22—to expose them to climate issues such as air quality inequity, environmental toxins and our fragile ecosystem. Campers are also learning about community organizing. “One of the things that has been most fascinating is watching the kids take something that they are passionate about and understand, like the video game ‘Among Us,’ and applying it to what they are learning about climate justice."
Spring to early summer brings us many beautiful sacred days and seasons pulling us into encounters with the Holy. Our sacred traditions move us to return to that which grounds us and shapes us and forms us into better neighbors,…
Pastor Wangki, of Trinity Christian Church in Merced, works to support the Southeast Asian community as they face language barriers, information barriers, transportation barriers, and the threat of anti-Asian racism in their daily lives.
Mass policing and mass incarceration do not create safer communities. Instead, we must move to fully examine the root causes of criminal activity and violence and commit to dismantling the social determents that drive these behaviors.
In this Justice Revival Lecture, we invited Professor Najeeba Syeed to lead a discussion with us about how to explore models of justice that place agency and power in the hands of the community. Najeeba is the first director of…