Collaborative Learning Group Assignment
Group 3

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Group Name:  New Joy Life Evangelical Church

Group Members:  Ashley Beale, Jeffrey Jones, Lashundreya Townsend, Julie Green (Sustainable Bolivar Representative)

Group Characteristics:  You are a church in East Cleveland with an African American congregation.  You have a young minister to whom social justice is an important cause.  The Church has opened a food pantry, taking donations of canned goods and other food items from members and from local businesses, which they distribute to poor people in the county.  The Church also has an Empower Our Youth initiative, and is collecting funds to open an after-school recreational center for young people.  The minister frequently preaches on civil rights, and members of the church talk about addressing racial stratification in the county, but to date have not taken any action.

Group Perspective:  You believe that equality is an important value, and that the high levels of inequality found in the Delta are fundamentally immoral.  You think that every individual has a right to make a decent life, and that it is wrong for anyone to try to impose restrictions on this right.  Your group is concerned about the inequities in income, power, wealth and status among different groups in the Delta and is particularly concerned with the condition of many African American families in the region, and the high rates of poverty, unemployment, teen pregnancy and childhood disease and mortality in many Delta towns.  You believe that sustainable development is important, but that justice is necessary for sustainable development to occur.