Help Just Communities raise $43,000!

June 30th, 2019


"We're gonna take back this state and take back this country"  
- Eric Early, the Los Angeles attorney representing Fair Education Santa Barbara (Noozhawk, 4/8/19)


This is the latest language Fair Education Santa Barbara is using to describe Just Communities and the justification for their lawsuits against us and the Santa Barbara Unified School District.  These words reveal why our work is so critical and why we need your support now more than ever. Fair Education Santa Barbara is trying to force us out of the Santa Barbara Unified School District and pressure other school districts and organizations not to work with us.  As the saying goes, “We must be doing something right, if we’re receiving all this attention,” but it comes at a cost.  

We have been serving the Central Coast for 18 years, creating waves of change within individuals, institutions, and systems.  We could have scaled back our work and taken time to simply respond to this attack in the face of these lawsuits, their Fox News media blitz, threatening phone calls and emails, and more.  But we haven’t.  Instead, we have chosen to continue investing in building our capacity so that we can continue our vital work, even as we respond to this new reality.

The cost of adding additional staff, working with consultants, investing in a security system for our office, and more has reached close to $6,000 a month since December 2018, which we estimate reaching a total of more than $43,000 by the end of June.   

We did not plan to be sued, but this is the cost of doing cutting edge work that creates real change.

Fair Education Santa Barbara’s lawsuits and criticism of our work is not about what’s best for our schools or what's best for all students.  It's not about education or fairness. It's about two competing visions for the future of our community and nation: theirs is a vision of moving backwards to a time when our nation and our schools worked only for some.  Ours is a vision of moving forward to a time when our nation and our schools work for all. Ours is a vision of a future in which the founding creed of this nation - liberty and justice for ALL - is no longer simply a set of words, but the daily practice of every school, every organization, and every community.

As someone who shares our vision, you have the power to help ensure our schools and communities continue to move forward, protect student access to diversity, equity, and inclusion curriculum in Santa Barbara Unified School District.  Your support will ensure a strong scholarship pool for our CommUnity Leadership Institute (CLI) this summer; assist in funding our second annual Government Alliance on Race & Equity (GARE) program; help us launch a new initiative to engage Central Coast nonprofit organizations and foundations in addressing issues of diversity, equity and inclusion; and sustain our efforts to provide implicit bias training to the Santa Barbara Police Department.  You can help us do all of this and so much more.

The McCune Foundation and our Board of Directors have made contributions that demonstrate their faith in our work, and the Santa Barbara Unified School District has now twice voted unanimously to continue their contract with us.   We ask you to join them by donating today, to further our life changing programs, and help us meet our goal of $43,000 by August 31st, 2019.

Again, many thanks for your support, it means the world to us.  The issues we’re working on aren’t going away tomorrow, because of this, we aren’t either.


Sincerely,

Jarrod Schwartz                    
Executive Director 

Visit our website to learn more about Just Communities: www.just-communities.org 



More information about Just Communities Central Coast: Just Communities offers cultural competency training to organizational leaders, education seminars for the general public, leadership training institutes for students and teachers, and customized consultation to local agencies for diversity and organizational change initiatives. Just Communities consciously works with people from a diverse cross-section of the community along the lines of race, income, gender, sexual orientation, age, and religious affiliation.