Latest OMI JPIC News
Gary Huelsmann Awarded Liberty Bell Award May 5th, 2015
Gary Huelsmann with his two daughters, Mariah and Chloe, at the Awards ceremony.
Congratulations are in order for Gary Huelsmann, long-time friend of the Oblates, and Chair of the OMI USA JPIC Committee. The Madison County Bar Association honored him last week by with their annual Liberty Bell Award. The Liberty Bell Award was established more than 40 years ago to acknowledge outstanding community service. Each group presenting the award is free to establish its own criteria. Many groups present it to a layperson, a man or woman who has promoted better understanding of the rule of law, encouraged greater respect for law and the courts, stimulated a sense of civic responsibility, or contributed to good government in the community. It is often presented to an individual lawyer or judge or to an entire community organization.
Gary is the CEO at Caritas Family Solutions, a faith-inspired social services agency devoted to the care and treatment of individuals and families, accessed through a network of regional offices, that is committed to promoting a just and caring community in the southern Illinois region.
Faiths See Climate Change as a Moral and Practical Threat May 4th, 2015
Faith groups are mobilizing on climate change, seeing it as an existential threat to creation. Pope Francis will issue a papal encyclical on the environment this summer, which is expected to highlight both the need to reduce man-made carbon emissions, and for wealthy countries to help poorer nations deal with it, as they have done little to create the problem.
Meanwhile, the Church of England is putting its pounds and pence where its mouth is: The body that administers the worldwide Anglican Communion last week announced it is divesting from thermal coal and tar sands.
Islamic finance has played a major role in clean energy investment so far this decade.
Divestment from these most carbon intensive forms of energy is also good financial management. With pressure growing both from businesses concerned about how to operate in a world disrupted by climate change, and increasingly vocal popular movements, a price on carbon to discourage its use, is becoming more likely. Alongside this is the fact that renewable forms of energy – wind, solar, geothermal, and the like, are increasingly cost competitive. If the damages to health and the climate were factored into the price of carbon fuels, renewables would already be a clear winner.
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Religious Leaders Support Normalization with Cuba May 4th, 2015
Photo credit (see below)
Thirty U.S. religious organizations signed onto a letter to Congress urging an end to the decades-long embargo with Cuba. The Rev. William Antone, U.S. Provincial, signed on for the Missionary Oblates USP. The letter refers to the long-standing ties of many of the faith organizations to religious bodies in Cuba, and cite their call for normalization of relations and an end to the embargo.
Photo credit: Krasivaja at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons
Two Years After Rana Plaza… May 1st, 2015
Two years after the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh, concerns linger. These include the timeliness of major remediation efforts, the establishment of factory health and safety committees, and corporate commitments to a victims’ fund. A coalition of global investors representing $2.5 trillion in assets – including the Missionary Oblates – have sent letters to corporate members of the Bangladesh Accord for Fire and Building Safety (Accord) and the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety (Alliance). The letters request that companies disclose their efforts to safeguard the lives of workers in Bangladesh garment factories.
Read the investor letter here…
Faith-based Investors Help VOICE to Secure Needed Funding from GE April 28th, 2015
Faith-based and socially responsible investors enabled leaders from VOICE (Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement) to use their proxies to attend the GE AGM in Oklahoma City on April 22. VOICE was interested to attend the AGM to press GE to commit to $1 million in funding for the Metro IAF/VOICE Equity Restoration Fund. The faith-based activists had already secured $1 million from J.P. Morgan and $1.5 million from Bank of America.
Their effort was successful, which the faith leaders learned in an email from the company just as they were boarding their flight to Oklahoma. The grant will serve to leverage $10 million+ from religious and other social investors to help finance the rehabilitation of blighted and abandoned properties, construction of new homes, the development of affordable rental housing, and other community restoration activities in Prince William County, VA.
The Oblates, through Fr Seamus Finn, OMI have been working with VOICE for several years on this initiative designed to help those crushed by the mortgage crisis in 2007-08.
Read the letter from GE committing to this grant funding.
