October 30, 2014. The Florida Times-Union.
At Abyssinia Baptist Church on Jacksonville’s Northside, about 450 members of 38 faith communities from across the city recently gathered, prayed and accepted a call to action.
The call was to hit the streets and church pews to recruit others willing to help research and recommend solutions for six pressing community issues and then lobby city leaders to implement them.
The future of Jacksonville is at stake, said leaders of the Interfaith Coalition for Action, Reconciliation and Empowerment, or ICARE, which represents about 30,000 Duval County residents.
“We have some very critical targets,” said the Rev. James Wiggins of St. Paul Lutheran Church and an ICARE co-pastor. “We want to continue to get participants and the support of community stakeholders.”
The target issues, most of which have been on ICARE’s plate for several years, are homelessness, mental health, education, jobs, youth crime and a statewide push to use civil citations rather than criminal charges for youth offenders.
The 450 people who attended ICARE’s “community problems assembly” Tuesday, and their new recruits, will convene Nov. 18 to join research committees. They will present their findings to city and community leaders at an April 20 Nehemiah Assembly.
Some of the group’s earlier recommendations have won the support of the city, school district and community organizations and have been implemented. The city opened a three-day-a-week daytime drop-in resource center for the homeless; Lutheran Services, a national health and human-services network, has agreed to help reduce local mental-health services waiting lists; and the school district is using the direct instruction teaching method to improve grade-level reading rates at some schools.
Also, Mayor Alvin Brown plans to form a “neighborhood wealth building” task force to tackle Northwest Jacksonville unemployment, said the group’s other co-president, the Rev. Kent Dorsey of Riverside Avenue Christian Church.
“That is an exciting new development,” he said. “He is in the process of naming the task force and invited ICARE to be a part of the task force.”
But so much work remains to be done that ICARE added no other target issues to its plate at the October call to action meeting, he said.
“We are at capacity or beyond with the issues we are working with,” Dorsey said.
The immediate goal is to get more people to join the group and help research the issues, but he said he was impressed with turnout at Tuesday’s meeting. “There was a lot of energy,” he said. “We have to engage people. What we are doing to do takes concern and passion.”
Beth Reese Cravey: (904) 359-4109
ICARE
The research kickoff will be at 6:30 p.m. Nov. 18 at Arlington Congregational Church, 431 University Blvd. N., Jacksonville. To join or get more information, contact the Interfaith Coalition for Action, Reconciliation and Empowerment at 2650 Park St., Jacksonville 32204; (904) 388-9181; or icarejax@gmail.com or go to icarejax.org.
