Mental health??? In this economy?! It can be a challenge to find the nurturing your mind needs, but a supportive community can go a long way to help. One place you can count on finding a supporting community every fall is at HAFALI‘s annual Mental Health Walk. HAFALI hosted their latest walk last weekend in Baldwin with the theme of mental health in workplace.  LIJWJ and some other folks from the LI Fund Excluded Workers (FEW) Coalition joined to support.

Mental health is often stigmatized, which can make being open about the challenges of mental health difficult to do. This is probably most true in workplaces. Workers, especially immigrant workers, are treated like invisible commodities whose thoughts and feelings always take a back seat to productivity. For the Haitian community that HAFALI serves, xenophobia is applied as an additional layer of pressure as workers just try to do their jobs amongst the hateful rhetoric being spread about them.

In spite of all this, coming together for the mental health walk brought light and the bond of solidarity to all who attended, and will hopefully provide additional strength in the days ahead.

Vote YES on Prop 1 this Election Day!Working people are immeasurably and infinitely diverse. Each person possesses their own unique identity. Each identity is a complex cocktail of things like gender, ethnicity, religion, economic class, lived experience, ability, and a long list of other constituent parts that relate to and interact with each other.  

Alongside this diversity are universals that apply to every single person. These universals include the right to have control over who you are, and what’s best for your body. Caring and just societies by definition should include these rights as a fundamental pillar in their structure. Those who have authority over our current society like to project it as caring and just, yet certain protections over our identities and bodies are not enshrined as fundamental rights. A ballot measure you can vote on this Election Day, Prop 1, would help provide protections not available currently.

NYCLU is an excellent resource to understand the current holes relating to identity and bodily autonomy rights in NY’s constitution, and how Prop 1 can fix them. The protections included in Prop 1 strengthen the position of all workers, union and non-union, by further reducing the way bosses can legally discriminate against them.

Repairers of the Breach – LIJWJ Faith Conference in December!

This December we hope you’ll join the LIJWJ faith community, including co-sponsors the Poor Peoples’ Campaign, NYS Council of Churches, and Abraham’s Table, for an engaging and thought-provoking conference – “Repairers of the Breach”: How Faith and Community Partners Can Build a Just Long Island Economy. Repairers of the Breach is open to all clergy, congregants, and individuals from all faith traditions (and secular folks too!) interested in participating in discussions on the intersection of morality, economics, and movement building.

The workshop lineup is packed full of topics and questions that cut to the core of why LI is the way it is, and what needs to be done to undo the centuries of harm to marginalized groups that have taken place here. Each workshop will be facilitated with a panel of faith and community leaders immersed in their fields of expertise. They include:

• Interfaith Perspectives on Principles of Economic Justice
• Exploring Our Working-Class Roots
• Congregational Properties – Knowing Our History, Shaping Our Future
• Congregational Properties: Repurposing For The Common Good
• What Can I Say? Preaching the Just Word
• Changing the Narrative by Changing the Narrator
• Voices of Worker Power
• Congregations as Engines for Wealth Creation
• Using My Faith Tradition to Envision a Just Long Island Economy
• The Future We Believe In: Faith-based Advocacy and How We Can Do It
• Our Moral Imperative – Act for Justice Now

Stay tuned for more info and a registration link! In the mean time SAVE THE DATE!!

In solidarity,

Long Island Jobs with Justice