A year ago this month, our group of religious leaders approached the Tribune seeking an opportunity to raise our collective voice on the pressing issue of gun violence in our city. This past year, our coalition has grown in size and in scope.
On the precipice of a new era in Chicago leadership, with a new mayor and City Council, we share a united vision for our shared future. We pledge to work toward this vision, offering our hands in partnership to our elected officials and you, dear reader, to help make this vision a reality.
As faith, spiritual and ethical leaders of this grand city called Chicago, we stand together to demand our civic leaders embrace a moral framework to address the challenges of our city. Our city needs this framework to ignite our collective consciousness to re-imagine the 234 square miles we call Chicago.
This framework is not based on political or religious affiliation, but on the common ground of our humanity for all citizens of this city to flourish, including children and elders who suffer under the yoke of poverty in a city and country abundant with resources.
A city’s budget is a moral document that highlights the true heart and “treasure” of a civic community. If we are to join our mayor in building a better, stronger, safer Chicago, we must pass a budget and create change that reflects the following moral imperatives:
* Make prevention of gun violence a priority. Categorize it as a public health issue and epidemic and not solely a public safety challenge. Funding an Office of Neighborhood Safety is critical. It would be designed to create and deploy strategies for gun violence prevention across this city.
* Recognize that housing is one of the most basic human rights. We must pass the Bring Chicago Home proposal to ensure that we prioritize housing the most vulnerable.
* Ensure economic opportunity in every neighborhood and improve access to public transportation to get to centers of economic opportunity.
* Focus on environmental sustainability in every aspect of what we are doing as a city.
* Ensure creative educational approaches to meet the needs of young people in every neighborhood, which in turn will help reduce violence, incarceration and civic mischief.
* Remove the shame of mental health challenges by making budget changes to increase support for those in need across the city, including youths and children.
* Expanding summer work opportunities for the poorest young people in our community requires Chicago companies to join this effort to improve the lives of all citizens.
* Require corporations and small businesses to participate in creating economic opportunities in the forgotten corners of Chicago.
* Create solutions for how to receive, welcome and house immigrants who are seeking refuge and asylum while including communities who are most affected.
* Create opportunities for restorative justice, repair and renewal for those caught in the criminal justice system.
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As a city, we must recognize it is unsustainable and unfair for first responders — police and fire department personnel, as well as hospitals — to be the central units to engage issues of poverty and other human-created “isms” that manifest in forms such as homelessness, mental health crises, violence and the underground economy. Instead, our whole city needs to use a moral lens to create solutions. Though incomplete, we offer this moral framework as a beginning.
We have 50 wards in Chicago, and if any of us are going to thrive, we must all thrive. Setting aside scarcity mentalities, we must work for the good of the whole and not just for our own good.
We believe we are called to ignite our moral imagination to re-imagine what Chicago can be and shall be for generations yet to be born.
Chicago faith leaders Rabbi Seth Limmer and the Revs. Otis Moss III, Ciera Bates-Chamberlain and Michael Pfleger joined the Tribune’s opinion section last summer for a series of columns on potential solutions to Chicago’s chronic gun violence problem. The column continues on an occasional basis.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].