We invite you to invest in a liberative ecosystem!
Picture recap from our FREE open house of Diasporic Delights Pop Up Cafe featuring community, culture and flavor from Puerto Rico and Haiti.
Are you ready to fight? Do you want to step up and use your story and your skills to make change for our great city and state? Do you want to fight fascism by making Chicago a safer place in this harsh world?
If the answer to any of that is yes, we want to talk to you. We’re getting ready to start putting together our first cohort of P.O.W.E.R. Builders this spring in our new, soon-to-be revealed leadership development program as part of Northside P.O.W.E.R.. This is training that will develop organized leaders in the movement to take action and hold power to account while winning important policy battles for the people.
Email me at zoltan@ajustharvest.org, and I’ll get you on the list of folks ready to fight for and build the community and city we all deserve.
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With Fire in Our Hearts and Freedom in Our Steps, We Thank Our Partners & Sponsors!
Weren’t able to make it? Click here to see our 3rd Annual Freedom Concert recap: https://ajustharvest.org/3rd-annual-freedom-concert/
A Just Harvest Partners with New Life Centers
This season we were able to give away coats, hats, gloves, blankets, clothes and hygiene kits to our community members. Weatherizing our community brought warmth to so many spirits and we want to give a huge thank you to our partner New Life Centers and our youth volunteers who helped organize and distribute.
The Wellness Center At A Just Harvest
Our Wellness Center at A Just Harvest is inviting the community in this season, as temperatures drops, we aim to warm the hearts of our community with servitude and resources. Our Wellness Center will not only double as a warming center but also a wellness check in hub, resource center, organizing table and a safe space providing complimentary Men’s haircuts and clothing. Our love and service is extended to all the people of our Rogers Park and North of Howard neighborhood and all the surrounding neighborhoods who make up the A Just Harvest community, alongside the many businesses, corporations, grassroots organizations, and communities of faith who create community and build power with us to work for social, racial, economic, and environmental justice for every member of our society.
This space is open and accessible to all neighbors seeking to commune with us. Guests can enjoy their time using exercise equipment, yoga mats, doing art, playing board games, listen to music, watch an insightful movie or just be present in a space that is created for us all, while learning about the work of A Just Harvest.
More intimate one on one wellness support can be scheduled with our program and wellness Steward, Tatiana Atkins at tatiana@ajustharvest. Services may vary but can include prayer services, alternative therapies, job resource support, addiction recovery support, school enrollment support, housing support and goal setting and reaching.
We want to take time this to bask in the immense warmth that was brought to the community and our hearts over the coldest weekend this year, as we used our Wellness Center at A Just Harvest for an emergency 24 hour warming center.
The deep gratitude from our community members to be able to come into a warm, clean facility – met with love, integrity and good warm food thanks to our local businesses J.B. Albertos and Redz Belizean Restaurant , snacks and sandwiches from St Andrews Greek Orthodox Church Hitting the Streets and covers from San Lucas United Church of Christ . This was all very short notice and these businesses and organizations pulled through with such compassion and wanting for their community what they want for themselves. I want to give thanks to our volunteers who came through to hold shift and help to keep our facilities clean and showing love to those who need it most. This is community, this is equality, this is wellness, this is A Just Harvest!
Our warming center is open Monday-Friday 9am-5pm
A Just Harvest has been a base for community members in need of support through access to warm meals daily—every day for more than 40 years. Now we are building a base in community relations through a host of services and projects that not only strengthen our community but also feed hope and renewal into our community members by opening safe spaces to exist in unity, from BINGO days to our warming center, free haircuts and hygiene kits, clothing support, movie days, art therapy, book clubs, and more—whatever it takes to spread love, integrity, and support that refreshes the spirit, body, and mind—we are all we got!
We are not well until we are all well and we can support more with more support!
Help us spread joy, warmth and engage in hospitality and mutual care.
Volunteer Today, Give Today ✨️
Community Voices and Lived Experiences
Stories of Strength and Struggle Behind the Movement
Behind every policy issue or community initiative are real people with powerful stories. Our Story Bank lifts up the voices of neighbors who share their experiences with housing insecurity, resilience, and advocacy. These stories remind us that change begins with listening and bearing witness to one another’s truths. They also challenge us to move beyond awareness toward collective responsibility and action. By listening to these stories, we deepen our understanding of justice and the ongoing work required to build a more equitable, compassionate community for all.
Boss Yo Brother Up, every Friday
“Speaking up when and where you can, in the circles in which you run, with the people that you know, is how change happens.”
From the Change Agents Dispatch, by David Zoltan
Good morning gutsy Change Agents,
Today is Purim for us Jews. Purim is one of those problematic holidays that has a pretty revolutionary message throughout, but ends with preemptive slaughter of our enemies which… is not ok and seems to be the part that too many took away from it as we see this week in Iran. I have mostly positive feelings about the holiday though and want to focus on those parts.
As the story goes, a Persian king picked a wife, Esther, who was Jewish but didn’t let the king know this. The king had a Prime Minister, Haman, who was deeply antisemitic and who got the king to issue an edict to kill all the Jews in Persia. Esther’s uncle, Mordecai, tells Esther to use her position as queen to speak to the king and help her people. She does so by inviting the king and Haman to a dinner feast for three nights. On the second night of the feast, she reveals that she’s Jewish and asks the king for mercy for the Jewish people. The king is moved and grants her mercy.
That mercy is the preemptive killing part, but the point is that when you find yourself in a place to speak truth to power from a position of privilege that it is your duty to do so. That using your proximity to power is not just a moral obligation but an effective way to achieve justice.
Very nearly all of us have some privileges and a great many marginalizations. Leveraging those privileges when you can on behalf of others is, as Jews say in Hebrew, a mitzvah, or what many of you goyim would call a blessing. As someone that has conditional white privilege, I am constantly looking at how I can leverage that privilege to speak to disability justice, queer justice, justice for unhoused people, and justice for Jews, all of which I have direct lived experience. But I also use that privilege to speak to Islamic justice, racial justice, and so forth within the realm of issues that I advocate for.
Speaking up when and where you can, in the circles in which you run, with the people that you know, is how change happens. There is actual science to this. As humans, we are moved, first, by stories, especially by people that we have connections to in some way, be they personal or associated, like a common background or even something like going to the same college. Facts are important too, but the stories come first to change our minds, and then we bolster that decision with the facts.
As we organize to end hunger and poverty, we must constantly be looking for the ways in which we can use our stories and our connections to work for change. When I go to speak to people in power, they listen to me because I show up, have built relationships with them, and then I toss them a story of how these issues have affected me or others in our community. I hit them with all the facts and research that I have floating around in my head, and I answer all the questions they have or tell them I will find out and get back to them. In the end, I work to address their concerns, and I move them to stand with us.
These things sound so simple because they are. Any of us can do this. I have years of experience and a wealth of stories and knowledge, but when you come and tell your own story, that adds power to the push. This is why we organize.
And to show you that it works, I am proud to announce that we’ve moved our initial housing junk fee bill to the House floor! It will be heard on the 18th, and we expect it to pass and get sent to the governor to be signed. This means that we will have passed a law that bans or limits 11 housing junk fees, limits move-in fees, and ensures transparency on the first page of your lease. This will save you money, get more people housed, and limit landlord power so that they can’t exploit us quite so much as they do now.
And it’s just March! There’s a ton more work to do on putting in some protections for SNAP benefits, more work on housing, advancing our effort to deprivatize Medicaid, achieve economic justice, institute more progressive revenue solutions, and make sure we have enough money to fully fund the Pretrial Success Act.
Keep an eye out for witness slips in the days ahead. In Illinois, you can show your support or opposition for bills being heard in committee which is a quick and easy way to tell a story of sorts in a communal way via online form. We’ll help you navigate those as they come up in the weeks ahead with Action Alerts.
In the meantime, think about where your story can make a difference, and come organize with us on these and many other important ways to end hunger and poverty. It’s an important way that we fight tyranny like that of Haman. Or Trump.
And happy Purim to all.
Our campaign to end housing junk fees continues this year, and we believe we will win this year to end a number of those junk fees, put limits on move-in fees and security deposits, and to make sure you can see all the mandatory fees on the front page of your lease for full transparency: https://actionnetwork.org/
Our efforts to end money bond in Illinois didn’t stop there. We’ve also won the Pretrial SUCCESS Act which ensures that people awaiting trial have access to supports and services from housing assistance to transportation and child care to help get them to court and put their best foot forward before the judge towards a fair resolution to their case. We need to fully fund the SUCCESS Act this year at $15 million: https://actionnetwork.org/
Our allies at Citizens Action have been fighting to make prescription drugs affordable via a Prescription Drug Affordability Board. While we’re not working on this campaign directly at this time, this is precisely the kind of thing that will keep more money in your pocket while improving health outcomes that we need. Let’s show them some support: https://actionnetwork.org/
Finally, we need to keep the pressure on Congress to hold back the horrible impacts of the Big Disgusting Bill. Tell your Congresspeople that they need to prioritize ending or at least delaying the impact of the state’s cost sharing so that we can put solutions into place: https://chicagosfoodbank.