The social justice committee at Sacred Heart is part of an emerging network of social justice committees, certainly in this community. Three high schools have social justice committees now, and the United Church, the Anglican, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic churches all have elements of more or less formal social justice activities.
When we were initially set up by Bishop Thomas Lobsinger—he died in a plane crash in 2000, but he established the committee in 1991—he gave us a dual mandate to act locally, but to act globally as well. He saw these two factors as inextricably linked.
That has led us to be instrumental in local initiatives, such as setting up a weekend soup kitchen. For a long time, there was not a place in town on a daily basis where a person who was hungry could securely have a warm meal. The Salvation Army provided five days a week, but nothing on the weekends. In 1992, I think it was, one of our initiatives was the local weekend soup kitchen, which, for over the last 17 years, has literally served tens of thousands of meals to the local hungry in our community. It's done as an organizational model that is very light on its feet. We have volunteers from a wide variety of organizations who take on the responsibility of one Saturday or one Sunday a month, or maybe once every two months. So there's a broad network of people who are engaged in this fundamental need in our community.
At the same time, we've tried to develop active solidarity linkages and relationships with groups like DESMI, which is a socio-economic development organization working with indigenous peoples in Chiapas, Mexico. We've sent people down there, they've sent people up here. We have fundraised for them and they've provided us with certainly the wisdom of their experience working on grassroots development in their area.
Education on both of these fronts has led us to an understanding of the common underpinnings of the problem of poverty and inequality at all levels, from local to international. Networking, as you've heard from others who have made presentations to you before—the anti-poverty coalition and others—is really fairly important in northern communities. In fact, it's essential. It's certainly been part of our efforts here too. We feel that it is a baseline for us to be engaged in broader networks.
We share the analysis of local and global implications of poverty with groups like KAIROS, the Canadian ecumenical church-based social justice movement, which I'm sure you're familiar with. As they note in their mission statement:
Informed by biblical teaching, KAIROS deliberates on issues of common concern, striving to be a prophetic voice in the public sphere.
Inspired by a vision of God’s compassionate justice, KAIROS advocates for social change, amplifying and strengthening the public witness of its members.
Responding to Christ by engaging in social transformation, KAIROS empowers the people of God and is empowered by them to live out our faith in action for justice and peace, joining with those of goodwill in Canada and around the world.
Similarly, we have had speakers up from Make Poverty History—which I'm sure you're aware of as well—and we have engaged in some of their campaigns. As you recall, from their perspective, poverty is a violation of human rights on a massive scale. They have pushed us to support the United Nations millennium development goals and certainly Canada's support for them, where minimum targets are set to reduce poverty, hunger, illiteracy, discrimination against women, and environmental degradation. Just like their goals, which targeted 2015 as the key date, there are other organizations that we've been linked to. For example, Campaign 2000--which you also are aware of, I'm sure--sparked, I think just last week, another motion on the floor of the House of Commons. Both pointed to the fact that we've been woefully remiss in meeting those targets.
But that doesn't deter us, from our perspective, in terms of seeing the linkage between the local and global, and how essential it is for us, if we're addressing local needs, to have before us the global reality as well.
Make Poverty History, of course, cites the need for a shift in national and international policies to eliminate poverty. Here, what they want and what we do as well and what we advocate in our social justice committee, is quite in line with their perspective, calling for more and better international development aid—certainly justice on the trade issue, cancellation of debt, and, like Campaign 2000, calling for an end to child poverty in Canada. These campaigns are mirrored by other organizations you've heard from, I'm sure—Canada Without Poverty and others.
Often there's a real gap between what we hope to achieve and the vision that is offered at the government level. We often hear the rhetoric, but the reality is there's often a fairly large gap between the two. Some of those are just by nature of the structural reality we're in and surrounded by.
One of my first experiences of a government that was presenting a vision of a very different way of structuring the social and economic conditions they were facing was Chile. I had the opportunity, with a student group years ago, to be in Chile during the 1970 election, which brought Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity Party to power. They had a very different perspective that was offering concrete alternatives, making clear choices. The choices they were advocating, in terms of bank reform, land reform, basic restructuring of their society to address the great inequality that exists between rich and poor, were subverted by the international structures they were enmeshed in. So unless we can envision changing those larger structures and truly making them in line with Catholic social teachings, a preferential option for the poor, an option that sees our image of progress we've promoted since the Industrial Revolution as being essentially bankrupt, as our social encyclicals since the turn of the century have said, there can be no progress toward complete development of individuals without a simultaneous development of all humanity in the spirit of solidarity.
I can leave it at that. I had a bit more, but you have my notes as well.