CHAPEL HILL -- A new chapter of the community-organizing group that trained Barack Obama challenged local politicians Monday to embrace an agenda that includes increasing affordable housing, raising wages for government employees, protecting immigrant renters, closing the racial achievement gap in local schools and expanding access to health care.
Justice United formed earlier this year under the name "Orange County Organizing Committee," a sister organization of Durham CAN and Raleigh ROAR. Together, they form Triangle CAN, part of the Industrial Areas Foundation, an activist group established in 1940 to unionize meatpackers in the Midwest.
IAF has won campaigns for living wages, affordable housing and school reform across the United States. Justice United recently participated in an IAF march in Charlotte, confronting Bank of America and Wells Fargo on high credit-card rates.
But most of the group's goals are local: a new school bus route to keep children in Habitat for Humanity's Rusch Hollow neighborhood from having to cross a busy road while walking home; keeping a trash-transfer station away from neighborhoods that have lived with the county landfill since the 1970s; maintenance of sidewalks, lighting and trees in historically black neighborhoods near downtown Chapel Hill; expanded hours and free medical care at UNC Healthcare clinics.
Justice United asked candidates for Chapel Hill Town Council, Carrboro Board of Aldermen and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board to commit to an individual two-hour meeting with group members within 90 days of the election. The group also requested a response to a recent audit of infrastructure in the Northside and Pine Knolls neighborhoods that found cracked sidewalks, broken lighting, litter and overcrowded student housing that violates neighborhood conservation rules.
Three mayoral candidates and Town Council candidates Jon DeHart, Ed Harrison, Jim Merritt, Matt Pohlman, Will Raymond and Penny Rich attended. Incumbent Laurin Easthom and challenger Gene Pease didn't attend.
Mayoral candidate Augustus Cho, a native Korean, questioned the exclusivity of organizing black, Latino and white parents to improve schools. "I'm asking myself the obvious question," Cho said. "I'm hoping that this is an oversight."
The Rev. Mark Davidson, pastor at Church of the Reconciliation, assured Cho the conversation would also include Asian families.
Mayoral candidate Matt Czajkowski used the opportunity to stump on commercial development, the centerpiece of his platform.
"Both Chapel Hill and Orange County are out of money," he said. "We're actually having to sort of cut back. We have to grow the pie. We have to find a way to bring more resources into our community."
Rival Mark Kleinschmidt appealed to Justice United's democratic values, emphasizing his work as a former high-school civics teacher and lawyer for indigent clients on death row.
"You can make a difference in your lives by participating in local government," he said.
Justice United brings together UNC students, a dozen Christian churches, two Jewish congregations, affordable-housing and social-service agencies and neighborhood conservation groups. The IAF affiliate aims to use the force of numbers to influence policy in Orange County.
"We change nothing in this community without power," said the Rev. Thomas Nixon of St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church.
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