Episcopal Urban Caucus assembly set for February 13-16 in Oakland, California
Episcopal News Service. January 4, 2008 [010408-03]
The Episcopal Urban Caucus (EUC) 2008 Assembly is set to meet February 13-16 at the Hilton Oakland Airport Hotel in Oakland, California. This year's theme is "The Road to Peace."
Committed to advocacy, strategy, and action, EUC serves as a network bringing into relationship individuals and organizations that promote the progressive agenda of the Church through an annual Assembly with focused workshops, dynamic speakers and preachers, site visits to exemplary models of urban ministry and learning tracks that effect positive change.
At the intergenerational gathering, Eva Jefferson Patterson, president and founder of the Equal Justice Society, will deliver the keynote address and Ethan Vesely-Flad, editor of "Fellowship" magazine will speak at the Episcopal Peace Fellowship (EPF) luncheon.
Patterson, dubbed the "peaceful warrior" for fostering non-violent protest in the aftermath of the 1970 shooting of student demonstrators at Kent State, worked at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights for 26 years, prior to taking the helm at Equal Justice. She was a leading spokesperson in the campaigns against Proposition 187 (anti-immigrant) and Proposition 209, an anti-affirmative action proposal in which U.C. Berkeley's admission policy would have limited access to students of color. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and U.C. Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law.
Vesely-Flad is a veteran of faith-based activism, particularly within the Episcopal/Anglican Church community, having worked in the field since he was an undergraduate student in the late 1980s. His nonviolent work on behalf of racial justice, environmental justice, human rights, LGBTQ rights, and demilitarization has taken him throughout the Americas as well as Southern Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific Rim.
Assembly participants will also visit sites and have the opportunity to attend workshops which include: Global Justice, A Religious Issue; Black Alliance for Just Immigration; Moratorium on the Death Penalty; Night Ministry of San Francisco; Legal Services for Prisoners with Children-Intergenerational; Non-violence and Justice; Organizing for Social Change, and Economic Justice.
Further information and registration is available here.