Dear City Church,
Just this week we learned that as part of the city budget planning process, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) is proposing to eliminate funding for General Civil Legal Services.* As a result, our partners at Open Door Legal will lose $2.2 million in annual funding, which is one-third of their total budget.
Why does this matter to us?
1. Open Door Legal is a partner organization. Founder and Executive Director, Adrian Tirtanadi is a City Church member, and we have financially supported ODL from their very earliest days. We annually give to ODL out of our missions budget, because we believe that the work they do embodies courageous participation in God’s transformative love here in San Francisco. They do this by providing completely free legal representation to our most vulnerable neighbors. Here in the United States, there is no right to legal aid in civil cases – so people who can’t pay for an attorney to help them with housing, domestic violence, custody, labor, or other cases are often at the mercy of better-resourced landlords, employers, or domestic partners. Universal access to legal representation advances dignity, equity and justice in our city.
2. Open Door Legal’s work enables us to help care for our neighbors in a vital and tangible way. Their work alleviates poverty and prevents homelessness at its source. For many of our neighbors – for whom one missed paycheck is the difference between staying housed and losing shelter – ODL is the only place they can go for help resolving issues like wage theft, unsafe living conditions, immigration matters, and unfair housing practices. Successful cases enable our neighbors to stay in their homes, receive their rightful restitution, maintain custody of their children, and hold landlords to equitable and safe housing practices.
3. Participating in the work of God's transformative love throughout San Francisco. In a city where resources are unevenly distributed, justice should not be a commodity good. We believe that Open Door Legal’s services embody God’s love for our neighbors and advance the kind of justice we long for when we pray for God’s kingdom to come. The budgeting decision by MOHCD will drastically impact their ability to do that work, which they estimate will result in an increase of homelessness by 4% and $10M lost for low income families. Because of this, we are issuing this invitation to collective action.
What can we do?
Adrian and the Open Door Legal team have identified three specific actions that we can take in response. The goal is for our collective voice to be clearly and respectfully heard by our city leadership, and for this decision to eliminate funding for legal services to be reversed. Please prayerfully consider one or more of the following ways to take action:
1. Submit Public Comment online, requesting that funding be restored, by April 9 at 5 pm
2. Email your local supervisor and Mayor Lurie at daniel.lurie@sfgov.org. You can use this template.
3. Attend the Public Comment Session on March 18, 5-7 pm, at 1 South Van Ness Ave, 2nd floor. We are seeking 15 people to join Pastor Emily in this effort. Embodied presence is a valuable way to indicate how seriously we take this issue.
If you have any questions, please reach out: you can email elders@citychurchsf.org, and a member of the board’s public witness committee will get back to you.
Faithfully,
Public Witness Committee**
Sarah Dahl
Henry Roark
Julia Jackson
Manuel Penton
Evan Coughenour
*The announcement is here, on page 3 of this document
**At our Feb 23 congregational gathering, we shared about conversations the Elder Board has been having around City Church’s public witness: how we testify to our faith and values collectively in our city. We announced the formation of a Public Witness Team, and invited those interested to assist in discerning when and how to engage in collective action or witness. When the church receives requests like the one that prompted this letter, we follow a process of discernment and then submit our recommendation to the Elder Board for approval. The Elder Board then votes on authorizing any call to action – and has voted to approve this one.
We are committed to transparent communication and decision-making and will offer more details about this in the coming weeks. However, it might be helpful to know that this particular request came very soon after we had made formal moves toward embodying our commitments to public witness. The Public Witness Team met for the first time just one week ago to affirm our process of discernment. This past Wednesday, the Elder Board approved our Public Witness policy. On Thursday, our partners at Open Door Legal reached out with this request. Because of our close partnership with Open Door Legal and the time-sensitive nature of this request, we made the decision to put our process into action – even though we hadn’t yet had a chance to share about it with the community. This is the first time we’ve put our process into action and we’ll continue to refine it going forward. We are learning and journeying together through this and ask that you would join in these efforts as we seek to participate in the work of God’s transformative love throughout San Francisco!