Matthew Cavanaugh
ECM's acting executive director, Bishop Bud Cederholm, with Bishop Burgess's daughters, Margaret Harrison and Julia Burgess
About 450 friends and supporters of Episcopal City Mission turned out for the organization’s annual fundraising dinner on June 9 at Boston University, where they helped celebrate organizations and activists working for social change, heard various rallying calls to give and act for social justice and were urged to engage in some “sacred gossip.”
The evening’s program highlighted ECM’s Burgess Urban Fund, which marks its 40th anniversary
this year. It began as the Joint Urban Fund, created by the 12th bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts, the late Rt. Rev. John M. Burgess, to help address city poverty. Despite some controversy at the time, every church in the diocese gave money to the effort, and $250,000 launched the fund. ECM renamed the fund in Burgess’s honor when he retired in 1975.
To date, according to ECM, the fund has provided nearly $5 million in grants to 283 organizations that work to address the systemic causes of urban poverty through community organizing, advocacy and leadership development.
ECM’s goal at the dinner was to raise $40,000 for the fund’s 40th year.
Matthew Cavanaugh
The Rev. Canon Ed Rodman and Mel King urged the crowd to social action.
A video tribute traced some of the fund’s history, and two of Burgess’s collaborators in the creation of the fund, the Rev. Canon Edward Rodman and community activist Mel King, were among the honored guests in attendance. Each offered remarks acknowledging key players in the fund’s history—including the Rev. Thomas Kennedy, the Rev. Gil Avery and the late Bishop Morris Arnold—and urged the crowd to future action.
King used the opportunity to call for support for reform to the state’s criminal justice system, noting the Senate hearing that had taken place earlier in the day at the State House and citing some of the financial and social costs of mass incarceration.
Rodman’s parting words were: “Don’t stop now.”
Theirs was an example of “sacred gossip” that keynote speaker Sister Simone Campbell recommended as a way to “do justice in our lives.”
“We have to ask the question: Is justice happening here? Can we make a difference?"--and then spread the word, she said.
Sister Simone Campbell recommended
"Faith calls us in the Christian tradition to carry Jesus into the marketplace, to ask the questions Jesus would ask now,” Campbell said. “We the people have got to have holy curiosity and sacred gossip so that we create a groundswell of claiming the communal reality that we’re in this together.”
An attorney, poet and the executive director of NETWORK, a Catholic social justice lobbying group, Campbell is nationally known as an organizer of the cross-country “Nuns on the Bus” tours that have focused attention on federal funding for programs serving the poor, immigration policy and voter turn-out efforts.
During the program, ECM honored three individuals and one organization for their social justice efforts.
Matthew Cavanaugh
The Boston Warm Coalition, the Rev. Edward Cardoza, Ella Auchincloss and the Rev. Liz Steinhauser received social justice awards.
Awards went to the Rev. Edward Cardoza, the founder and executive director of Still Harbor, whose programs support individuals and organizations in discerning their call and commitment to service and help social justice activists develop spiritual practices that sustain their work; Ella Auchincloss, the founder of the Leadership Development Initiative, a teaching and coaching program that helps congregations develop their leadership capacity for mission and outreach; and the Rev. Liz Steinhauser, whose community organizing and leadership development work as the director of youth programs at St. Stephen’s Church in Boston touches young lives through school-church partnerships, church-based enrichment and employment programs and a diocesanwide antiviolence coalition.
ECM also honored Boston Warm, an interfaith coalition that rallied this past fall and winter to open two emergency day shelters and advocate on behalf of the 700 people who were displaced when Boston’s Long Island homeless shelter and rehab programs were abruptly closed last October.
--Tracy J. Sukraw