OUR MODEL

JUST utilizes community organizing as a method of building power, particularly for people and communities traditionally excluded from decision-making. Also referred to as “base-building,” it involves community organizers working to build grassroots leadership to create and advocate for policy solutions and changes to systems that produce inequities. Organizers build relationships and develop leaders to engage in campaigns that advocate for changes that will improve their communities. Community organizing often happens at a local level, as organizers and residents in regions, cities, and neighborhoods work together and take action to call for policy changes.   

This broad-based organizing has been the backbone for the success of larger social movements, such as the fight for civil rights for Black Americans over the past 50 years.  

Community organizing creates opportunities for residents to come together into an organization that acts in their shared self-interest and to connect with systems of power and enact change. Organizing groups have been at the forefront of efforts to advance housing justice in areas such as civil rights for people experiencing homelessness, policies to protect renters from high rents and evictions, acquiring property and land for housing, and protections against neighborhood displacement.

Faith-based community organizing (FBCO), also known as Congregation-based Community Organizing, is a methodology for developing power and relationships throughout a community of institutions. JUST utilizes the faith-based approach to community organizing. Currently, we bring together 22 congregations representing the diversity of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faith traditions in Savannah-Chatham County.  

Our faith-based organizing aims to influence systemic change. 

Systemic change organizing:

• Aims at root causes, not symptoms.
• Builds collective responses, not individual solutions to problems.
• Seek to change attitudes, behavior, laws, policies, and institutions the better to reflect values of inclusion,  fairness, equity, and diversity.
• Insists on accountability and responsiveness in such institutions as government and other public service institutions.
• Expands democracy by involving those closest to social problems in determining their solution.