Becoming Beloved Community June 13: Humanitarian Actions to Take Now
This post describes actions you can take this week on behalf of people under duress:
- Bear witness for transgender youth at Statehouse hearing June 14
- Contact your Ohio Senator now about the Senate’s proposed deep cuts in state funding for public schools, food, childcare, and affordable housing
- Elizabeth Brown’s June 14 webinar: what’s at stake in Aug. 8 special election on proposal to significantly increase hurdles to citizen-sponsored constitutional amendments
- Help Ohio Mauritanians aid asylum applicants fleeing violence
Bear Witness for Trans Youth at Hearing June 14 on bill to ban gender-affirming care: Clergy and laypeople are asked to meet at the Ohio Statehouse Rotunda June 14 at 8:30 in preparation for the 9:30 hearing on HB 68, which would ban gender-affirming care, including mental health services, for transgender youth in Ohio. The hearing of the House Public Health Policy Committee begins at 9:30 with a hard stop at noon.
Your presence at the hearing will show support at a traumatic time. You can also provide prayer and pastoral care in the George Washington Williams Room, which has been reserved as a safe space. HB 68 and other bills scapegoating LGBTQ+ Ohioans come as parents, teachers, and health care providers are struggling to prevent teen suicide. 237 people, including spokespeople from Ohio’s major children’s hospitals, have already submitted opponent testimony. Only 19 proponents testified – including the sponsor – but the bill is likely to pass.
Contact your Ohio Senator before Thursday about state budget: The Ohio Senate is poised to adopt deep cuts in the funding the Ohio House supports for public schools, food banks, affordable housing, and child care. The Senate is expected to vote by June 15. Please contact your Senator today, and call Senator Matt Dolan, Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, at 614-466-8056 with your views. Tell them about the people your congregation is striving to serve.
- Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Jake Zuckerman details the Senate cuts in his June 8tharticle, which includes data on food insecurity, evictions, and infant mortality in our state. In summary, Senate Republicans’ budget:
- Eliminates the Ohio House’s increase of $15 million for the Ohio Association of Foodbanks when an estimated 727,000 Ohio households don’t have enough to eat and 12% live in poverty.
- Eliminates the House’s $500 million tax credit for developers to build affordable housing.
- Eliminates the Governor’s and House’s proposal to expand eligibility for child care. vouchers to 160% of the federal poverty level when the shortage of affordable child care is a critical barrier to mothers being able to work.
- Diverts up to $1 billion from K-12 public school funding to cover universal vouchers, increasing the burden on local property tax when many local levies are failing.
- The bill also reduces individual income tax rates and the Commercial Activity Tax, starving the state’s safety net and diverting the burden for essential services to county property tax, which disproportionately burdens people on fixed incomes.
- Eliminates the House plan to increase teacher base pay from $30,000 to $40,000
Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks, said this budget feels like “a full-scale war on the poor, and it’s not just the poor: these are Ohioans who work.” Amy Riegel, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing of Ohio pointed out that budget also expands prohibitions on pairing different kinds of tax credits on affordable housing development. “I think the only way we can describe it is an all-out assault on rental housing,” she said. “I do not believe at this time that Senate leadership understands the real struggle we’re facing in Ohio.”
Susan Kaeser, education specialist for the League of Women Voters Ohio, documented the injustice of the Senate’s voucher plan to rural Ohio children in her Sunday, June 11 guest column for the Cincinnati Enquirer. “Private education is widely available in urban counties but absent or very limited in rural Ohio,” she writes. “Eleven of our smallest counties have no private schools, and 35 more have between one and three private schools.” That’s more than half of Ohio’s 44 counties. In 2021-22, 1.49 million Ohio children attended public schools, and 167,000 used a private school. Kaeser points out that fair funding of public education across the state is required by Ohio’s constitution, but funding private schools is not.
“If lawmakers choose to direct more funds to private education without investing more in public schools…taxpayers in the poorest part of the state, who rely on their public schools, would be asked to subsidize private education that is not available to them, and their taxes would not be spent on the public schools that they rely on,” she says.
Webinar June 14 at noon: What’s at Stake in the Aug. 8 Special Election on Issue 1: Christ Church Cathedral parishioner Elizabeth Brown, JD, past president of the League of Women Voters of the Cincinnati Area, will explain Ohio Issue 1, which would raise new hurdles to qualify citizen-sponsored constitutional amendments for the ballot in Ohio, and increase the margin from a simple majority to 60% to pass one. She’s addressing the Metropolitan Area Religious Coalition of Cincinnati on Zoom. Click here to join the meeting. We’ll report more next week on the Special Election, including deadlines for registration, Ohio’s new, stricter rules on registering and voting, and any updates on the Ohio Supreme Court’s ruling on the lawsuit challenging the legality of this August special election. The Supreme Court ruled June 12 that the ballot language is misleading and needs to be corrected.
Help Ohio’s Mauritanian community welcome young people fleeing slavery and violent repression: Over the weekend the members of Cincinnati’s Immigrant Dignity Coalition sent out an urgent appeal to help young Mauritanians arriving in Ohio as asylum applicants. Black Mauritanians are suffering violence, oppression, and enslavement from their nation’s white majority. Cincinnati and Central Ohio are home to the largest community of Mauritanian families in the US. Many came to Ohio in the 1980’s and ‘90s as refugees from genocide. Here’s how you can support Ohio Mauritanians’ vital humanitarian response:
- Contribute to the GoFundMe page for shelter, clothing, and other needs.
- Organize housing solutions at your church or other buildings.
- Ask President Biden and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to approve Temporary Protected Status for Mauritanians. This would give them immediate access to work permits so they can support themselves while waiting for their asylum hearing. Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown (D) and Ohio Rep. Mike Carey wrote to President Biden in January to ask him to approve TSP for Mauritanians.
Contact Amadou Dia of the Mauritanian Network for Human Rights if you can help or have leads. He is based in Cincinnati.
“The vibrant community of Black Mauritanians in Greater Cincinnati has been making heroic sacrifices to house, clothe, and feed the newcomers; get them to their ICE check-in appointments; and try to find them legal representation,” writes Lynn Tramonte, Director of Ohio Immigrant Alliance, in a blog the second week of June. “It seems that every Mauritanian has at least one newly arrived asylum seeker living with them — and usually many more than that.”
The Mauritanian Network for Human Rights teamed up with Legal Aid to offer a workshop June 10 in Cincinnati on how to apply for asylum. Several hundred people, newly arrived in Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati, attended. “People leading the discussion had been in these young people’s shoes twenty to thirty years ago,’ Tramonte reported. “They have always advocated for human rights and an end to slavery and apartheid in Mauritania. Now they are leading the assistance effort and their children are helping with interpretation, fundraising, and even giving up their bedrooms so others can use them.
“I do not consider this ‘help for the needy.’” she adds. “The people who need assistance today are strong, brave, intelligent, and resilient. Many told us that the journey here was the hardest thing they have ever done. With the arms of the established Black Mauritanian community around them, they already feel less scared. They are eager to get settled in the US and feel useful. They will be wonderful neighbors, friends, and coworkers when they find their footing. And, they will be helping others in no time, too.”
Advocacy briefings are compiled by Ariel Miller, a longtime community advocate and member of Ascension & Holy Trinity, Wyoming. Connect with her at arielmillerwriter@gmail.com
