Ujima Iniative
Ujima is Swahili for: “Collective work and responsibility: to build and maintain our community together and make our sisters’ and brothers’ problems our problems and to solve them together.”
Mission: To organize and empower neighbors to help neighbors in practical ways that foster community.
Vision: To empower neighbors to live out the second greatest commandment: love your neighbors as yourself through building and maintaining our community together, by making our sisters’ and brothers’ problems our problems and solving them together.
The Ujima Initiative is a response to the community’s desire to find practical ways to help each other in an effort to be a “good neighbor”. This effort will not just be an opportunity to “serve” our neighbors but to create a community of friends and extended family. With Ujima we will help to create an alternative system to the entrenched welfare mentality and restore or preserve the dignity of the residents of the community.
We do this by empowering neighbors to help neighbors in practical ways, creating a “time bank” system, which will allow for people to use their talents and gifts as a trade commodity, and by organizing around collective issues and solving them with collective assets.
The underlining theme of Ujima, is to show Christ to our neighbors in tangible ways. We will work to nurture the spiritual fabric of our key community leaders through evangelism and discipleship. We will also seek to minister to neighbors’ spiritual needs continually through this platform.
“Carter Street Block Club”
As a part of Ujima, we have begun by using the process of community organizing on our street with our immediate neighbors.
Community Organizing:
Community organizing is a process of organizing community residents by establishing clear goals, implementing actionable plans in order to accomplish those goals, and creating that movement through collaborative efforts of neighbors.
