October 21, 2019. KCUR.
Maria Galvan used to make about $25,000 a year. She didn’t qualify for welfare, but she still had trouble meeting her basic needs.
“I would just be working just to be poor and broke,” she said. “It would be so frustrating.”
When things got bad, the single mother and Topeka resident took out a payday loan. That meant borrowing a small amount of money at a high interest rate, to be paid off as soon as she got her next check.
May 6, 2019. The Columbus Dispatch.
Ali Miller is an AmeriCorps VISTA worker who spends half of her paycheck on housing here in Columbus.
The job doesn’t pay much, she said — about $12,000 a year. That gives her no money for a car, or alcohol. She gets no money from her parents.
And a local social justice group says there are thousands more like Miller who can’t pay the escalating rents in a growing Columbus and central Ohio.
“We want affordable housing too,” said Miller, not new places with $1,000-a-month rents with granite countertops and fancy exercise rooms.
April 29, 2019. Topeka Capital-Journal
Religious fervor filled the Rev. Christine Potter’s voice Monday evening as she addressed more than 1,200 people from 23 Topeka-area congregations who packed into Most Pure Heart of Mary Catholic Church.
“Oh people of God — this beautiful, diverse body of God — we are called together to work our justice muscles in unity,” said Potter, associate pastor of Countryside United Methodist Church. “We are called to jump with our voices, with our hands, with our feet and our legs, our entire bodies. Topeka JUMP — jump for justice!”
December 5, 2018. The Charleston Chronicle.
Charleston City Council’s regularly scheduled December 4 meeting appeared almost a feeding frenzy as Mayor John Tecklenburg and councilmembers discussed the city’s 2019 annual budget. The mayor is proposing a nearly $223 million operating budget and several entities seeking municipal funding are in line for a share. They include a group that wants the city to increase the minimum wage for its employees to $15 per hour.
February 16, 2018. The Charleston Chronicle.
Charleston Area Justice Ministry President Rev. Charles Heyward thinks the network of faith-based congregations ended 2017 on a high note, though there were some disappointments. Currently some 28 congregations are members of the organization formed in 2011 to address social justice issues. Its first initiative in 2012 was to address Schools/Education and Crime/Violence. Each year since CAJM successfully has challenged issues that include wage inequity and police bias. Last November members voted to address affordable housing and gentrification in 2018.
