Dear Friends,
We have made it to our final day of action – today we focus on building our base! Education inequity in Pennsylvania affects us all. We must invite others into our work for Full and Fair Education Funding, because we are stronger together.
A FAITH REFLECTION
“But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles, they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not faint,” Isaiah (40:31). Let us be bolstered by some selections on hope from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark:
- Together we are very powerful, and we have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that, yes, we can change the world because we have many times before.
- To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety….Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.
- Hope and action feed each other. I see that being politically engaged meant having a sense of your own power—that what you do matters— and a sense of belonging.
- Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.
- The sleeping giant is one name for the public; when it wakes up, when we wake up, we are no longer only the public: we are civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies. We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, and of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant stays asleep. (Thank you, Mark Fifer, for this multi-faith reflection!)
OUR ACTION FOR TODAY:
Base-Building Day! Plan to have three one-to-one meetings with friends, acquaintances, clergy, colleagues, or other activists. Talk about your and their interests in Racial Equity and ending the Systemic Racism of our Pennsylvania Basic Education Funding method.
Resources for your conversations: POWERInterfaith.org/Education has our famous 10-minute video explanation featuring David Mosenkis. It also has a simple way to get onto the POWER email list.
Call on your county’s or area’s POWER EDUCATION CAMPAIGN team for things like Education Justice Workshops. If you don’t know how to reach your campaign team, call the POWER office at (215) 232-7697 or email info@powerinterfaith.org
RECORD YOUR ACTION ON OUR TRACKER
Lastly, please put a record of your action in our tracker on Google Forms.
Thank you for showing up with us this week and taking action to end education inequity in Pennsylvania. Let’s continue to fight for justice until we achieve Full and Fair Education Funding for ALL of our students!
