Social justice can be defined as justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society. It means having equality in basic human rights and it does not limited to certain movements. The housing crisis is a perfect example of why social justice is relative in today's society.
While in Milwaukee, it was easy to see the housing crisis. The city went through redlining many years ago, and it is still clearly seen today. Some of the reasons people don't have housing in Milwaukee is due to low wages, being evicted from multiple houses, no or bad credit, or their race. The housing in Milwaukee is not evenly distributed, but it isn't being overlooked. A couple of the organizations that we worked with are putting all of their efforts into helping this cause.
The Cathedral Center offers housing options to women and families. This is connected to social just due to the unequal burden that woman, those with mental illness and minorities carry when applying to and maintaining housing. Redlining, NIMBY (not in my back yard!) attitudes towards housing projects and unfair treatment have left the most vunerable of us with even less options. The Cathedral Center works against these odds by providing their clients with job opprotunities, long term safe housing options, and short term shelters. The Cathedral Center also has a sister non-profit; Friendship house. Friendship house is a longer term shelter which houses many of the clients who time out of The Cathedral Center. In addition to a lot of the resources that Cathedral Center offers they additonally have a reunification program for individuals who have children in foster care that they wish the reunite with. The stable, family atmosphere that Friendship House is ideal for these struggling parents to regain custody.
The Cathedral Center decided that our time would be best spent facilitating a conversation about the services they provide and how they affect the greater community of Milwaukee. We began by imagining what our image of a "Homeless person" "Trauma" and associated terms is. We then worked to defeat the incorrect ideals we applied to these terms. We toured both the Cathedral Center and Friendship house, facilitating deep thinking about homlessness and brainstorming about ways in which to improve their nonprofit. We also got to be introduced to another amazing employee; La'Taesha. La'Taesha told us personal, heartfelt stories about her time dealing with the social justice issues faced by those in need of housing in Milwaukee. Overall, the most moving part of this service project for the majority of us was congratulating a woman whom had earned a job through Cathedral Center, as this was proof that despite the social justice and many other issues at hand, the program they run really works!
Focus on Social Justice
ACTS Housing focuses on social justice by providing a non traditional way of obtaining a home. They strive to empower people through homeownership. They provide assistance to families by helping renovate foreclosed houses that can be bought at extremely low prices. The families are also not making rent payments. They are instead paying back loans that they took to renovate the homes which will save money in the long run. Overall this relates to social justice because it provides a home to families that could not obtain a home in the traditional way.
Our Experience
We got to ACTS Housing for an orientation and presentation on how the organization operates and the people that they serve. We learned that ACTS Housing takes a different route to housing people. They help teach homeowners the financial responsibilities of owning a home and they provide assistance to fixing up the houses. After the presentation we went to Ray and Monica Jackson's house. Once at the house we assisted the family in removing unwanted items from the house and helped scrap and repaint window frames and the garage.
Habitat for Humanity is a non-profit organization for helping people who are without the financial means to acquire their own house and creating neighborhoods. Our organization has three main ways we can contribute to making this goal possible: volunteers building houses, donating money and supplies, and helping others once your house is built. So, homeowners participate in most of their construction, but also their neighbor's construction, and they get help from many volunteers. Through this 'sense of community', they can purchase their house much cheaper. Looking at social justice, this is a good way to distribute the resource of wealth to social member by providing housing to a wider network of people.
Getting to the construction area, we received instructions and took a quiz for safety. Then we divided the team into three groups, one group helped build the roof with experts, staffs, and other volunteers. The second group covered the construction area with wood chips by shoveling the chips onto the mud. The last one worked inside of the house, installing a door and the windows. Although most of us didn't have the knowledge of building a house, following the experts' directions, we built pretty well. After we finished volunteering, I could see a clear difference before and after, and I felt good for not only doing something meaningful but also meeting nice people.