Please Give A Holiday Present to SCCCCOR - "The New Kid on the Block"

Like everyone else these days, SCCCCOR is having a bit of a money problem. Hopefully, when you read this brief letter, you will be moved to make a contribution of $5, $10 or $20 (or perhaps even more) as an end of the year gift to SCCCCOR.

You already know our name! Most people who read this letter will recognize our name. In terms of Santa Cruz County organizing, we are a relatively “new kid on the block”; but our work is vitally important, and that we have already made a significant contribution to county-wide organizing efforts.

Our job is to say the “R-word.” SCCCCOR is doing something that hardly anyone else is doing – talking about racism. Essentially, our mission is to re-introduce the “R-word” back into Santa Cruz county vocabulary. And in doing so, we hope to make everyone else’s work around all the other issues (education, immigration, law enforcement, health care, etc.) more effective.

Racism is the elephant in the room that takes up all the space and affects everything else we do, and especially affects all the other issues of justice that people work on. But racism is the issue that hardly ever gets talked about or that we don’t know how to deal with. SCCCCOR’s mission is to help deal with the elephant in the room, so we can all get down to more effectively organizing around other issues.

SCCCCOR has already done a lot! As many of you know, we have a grant from Kellogg foundation that has given us a footing to get started with our work. With this grant, we have been able to:

• Hire part time/student organizers and provide intensive training and mentorship for this staff;
• Build capacity in our staff and community by developing and facilitating workshops on racism and anti-racist organizing;
• Begin building coalitions to address institutionalized racism in law enforcement, immigration, social services and education. These coalitions are being built to exist long term, beyond the life of our grant;
• Bring a national partner, the Community Justice Network for Youth (CJNY) into our law enforcement coalition in order to map our Juvenile Justice system and hold stakeholders accountable for reform.

Why SCCCCOR needs money. So here’s the problem about money. In doing all this, we have also extended ourselves a little bit too far beyond our financial means, and we need some help in ending this year and getting started with next year. It’s not a really big budget problem, but it is a problem. If we can raise $3,000-$4,000 over the next month or so, we will be over the hump and enabled to start 2012 with a little more strength and confidence.

SO, we are asking our network of several hundred supporters to send us a small gift by the end of the year. If you are celebrating any end of the year holiday, please think of it as a holiday gift. Or, just think of it as a boost for the new kid on the block, that will encourage us to keep on raising the issue of the elephant in the room.

Thanks.

Here’s how to get your gift to us.

• If you’d like to make a secure donation online,
  • Go to RCNV.org/donate and click on the yellow “donate” button
  • Include the amount in the “Item price” box and click “Update”
  • After following the instructions on the right to log in, next to “Note to seller:” click on Add and type: SCCCCOR
  • Save it, and then click Pay Now
• Send a check by mail to SCCCCOR at 509 Broadway, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
  • Write the check to: "Resource Center for Nonviolence" and include SCCCCOR in the subject line.
  • Also, in a note, we'd really appreciate it if you would include your name, address, email, and phone number