Iowa City Area Circuit

Action Points from our July 20 meeting:

1. Celebrate and continue our connectional relationships with each other. We like working together as a faith circuit.

2. Act on our common desire for social justice for our neighbors.

   a. We are to send to Peggy email addresses of people in our church who want to be part of a listserv/network that spreads information about actions, education, and connections with other groups in the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids area, including places like West Liberty. We want to be part of the larger effort by groups such as Escucha Mi Voz Iowa, Catholic Workers House, the Marion Alliance for Racial Equity in Marion, the Justice and Liberation Coalition and others who already have organized protests against entrapping immigrants for immediate deportation. We also want to support places that assist immigrants, like Open Heartland.

   b. We want to develop a website that can be informational about actions to protect immigrants. North Liberty First can host that site on its server.

   c. Iowa City First is organizing a fall workshop on immigration rights and issues. Father Guillermo Treviño of West Liberty has committed to speak.

   d. Our desire to be community includes responding to the immigration crisis. 

   e. Mike and Lyle can make videos to tell different stories pertaining to current immigration actions. Expertise exists to help them: Enna as a Spanish speaker connected to affected people negatively and Deborah as a former mass communications and marketing professional.

   f. We are positive about bringing speakers to our churches to put names and faces to immigration actions. Also, we still have Gospel Without Borders that could be shown at our churches; some circuit churches already have done this.

   g. A local clergy group, Voice of Faith, is meeting to prepare for a July 29 action in Cedar Rapids (see poster). Peggy is in touch with them.

   h. Check the Iowa Migrant Movement for Justice website and sign up for its newsletter. The Iowa Conference is following this group and is linking into it.

On that note: Enna and Lyle were part of a conference social justice steering committee on July 9. Heecheon, Margaret, Enna and Lyle were part of a followup steering meeting on July 18, fairly impressive given that the circuit comprised four of the meeting's 25 attendees. Main points coming out of those meetings were adding to the number of people involved with protest groups statewide and creating a central UMC Iowa Conference communications network for rapid response to any social justice matter to which we should respond.