The current economic climate, along with the global events that led up to it, have exposed of the shortcomings of our economic system. This has significantly broadened the number of people in our communities who are now inspired to fight for change, and it has meant that even mainstream forces are starting to realize the need for serious transformation. We need to seize this opportunity to broaden our work and to win substantial victories that assure a just future. Our ability to do that, however, depends on how organized we are. Historically, many of our organizations have been limited by a parochial mindset, which has prevented us from taking advantage of these opportunities. Too often, we remain isolated in our different organizations, each working in a different community, or on a different issue. We have tended to focus intensively in specific neighborhoods in ways that feels intimate and grounded in peoples’ everyday social relationships. While being locally grounded is important, we also need to connect these neighborhood-based organizational formations to a broader organizational strategy for municipal, regional and even national change.

CJJC’s belief is that we need to build our work to scale in this historical period. More than anything else today, we need to build bigger, stronger and more popular organizations that can bring fights over our communities’ daily bread-and-butter survival struggles (like paying rent or getting jobs) together with a deeply transformational vision for a progressive future. By bringing different organizational models together, we believe we can break out of the box, expand our bases exponentially and start to win serious changes on a regional level.

With this in mind, Causa Justa :: Just Cause (CJJC) is committed to building a national and global movement for social justice. As a grassroots membership organization, we are among a small subset in the Bay Area working to make local, national and global connections around racial and economic justice. We believe building a movement of working-class people of color in the San Francisco Bay Area must begin with the acknowledgement that we are impacted by greater patterns of systematic oppression and privilege. We know our communities have a powerful role to play in advancing greater solutions.

To this end, CJJC engages in local grassroots organizing for the rights of low-income people of color most directly impacted by current inequities. CJJC actively promotes the political consciousness of our members, encouraging them to participate in training sessions and inviting them to think critically about their needs and interests as part of a larger context. We have a three-pronged approach to grassroots leadership development based on:

• Political Education
• Active Participation and Collective Struggle
• Local-to-National Alliance Building

We believe it’s important to avoid parochialism among peoples and organizations. We have big problems facing us, and we must dedicate our work to finding big solutions.

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