Dear Faithful Advocates
Download 2009 Policy Brief
Welcome to our Policy Wonk Network site. This site is your launching point for 2009 Priority Brief of the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy. This comprehensive site reflects the priorities of The Center as they have been developed over the course of the last quartercentury of our work and shaped by the input of our membership through the annual Member Poll.
On these pages you will be briefed on each of the Center’s priority areas, the specific issues we aim to take up, and the campaigns, goals and high-level strategies currently under way or in development. Additionally, insider documents for members only and public forums will allow you to engage at an entirey different level.
The most significant development this year is the Board’s decision, responding to your input, to add immigration as a marquee issue for The Center. The specific issues around immigration are complex. But through the addition of this new priority The Center will now add an important moral voice to the debate speaking out against injustice, oppression, prejudice and downright unfairness inherent in the current state-level debate.
In addition, monitoring church and state relations on behalf of our judicatory partners is an area that we will continue to resource. When legislation emerges that is of concern, we will bring it to the attention of the judicatories and work with them to craft strategies that will support the integrity of the constitutional guarantee of religious liberty. Finally, The Center is taking the lead in a broad coalition of non-profit organizations and business partners to advocate for a change to our current partisan-based legislativeredistricting. This is a threshold issue for much
of our work across our priorities.
This session of the General Assembly will be very challenging given the current economic climate, but at no time in The Center’s history have we been better prepared to tackle the tough issues and make the highest use of our network of friends and coalition partners.
Together we can create impactful, lasting and sustainable progress toward creating a more just and compassionate Commonwealth. I hope that you will use the 2009 Priority Brief together with our other advocacy materials as you live out your call to be a faithful advocate. Please share this belief with friends, family and colleagues and encourage them to LEARN, PRAY and ACT, too. The Commonwealth depends on it.
Faithfully,
Reverend Charles Swadley
Chairman of the Board