Our latest achievements:

Check out what we’ve been up to this year!

Tax the Rich!  Causa Justa members became electoral outreach team leaders to help get out the vote on important progressive ballot measures this election season, talking to low-income voters throughout East and West Oakland, as well as the Mission District and Excelsior District of San Francisco. Collaborating with our allies in Oakland Rising and San Francisco Rising:

•    We helped pass Prop 30, ensuring that millionaires and corporations pay their fair share of taxes; successfully opposed Prop 32 which would have silenced the voices of working families in elections; and passed Prop 39 which closes a business tax loophole and raises funds for clean energy and green jobs.  
•    In San Francisco, we helped pass Measure A to support critical funding to save City College; Measure C, which supports affordable housing to keep families in SF; and Measure E, which protects small businesses while raising revenue for city-funded programs.

Take Back the People’s Bank In September, 20 CJJC members participated in the Right to the City Alliance’s Member Congress in Los Angeles where we helped launch the national “Take Back the People’s Bank!” campaign to make Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac serve the 99% not the 1%, demanding principal reduction to real value for all underwater homeowners, an end to all Fannie-Freddie evictions, and the selling of foreclosed property to occupants or non-profits at real value, not to -investors and hedge funds. Margarita Ramirez, one of the tens of thousands of people impacted by bad Freddie/Fannie policies across the country was one of the featured foreclosure fighters in a Fault Lines documentary “For Sale: The American Dream” and is one of several Causa Justa members who traveled to Los Angeles as part of the Right To the City Congress  and the Fannie Mae actions.

Foreclosure Prevention Policies After years of demanding that the City of Oakland respond to the foreclosure crisis with local strategies to hold the big banks accountable, we successfully pressured Oakland City Council last month to pass a Comprehensive Foreclosure Prevention Program that will help keep Oakland’s low-income tenants and homeowners in their homes.  This is after we successfully pushed the City to expand the Foreclosed Property Registration and Maintenance Ordinance in May to include tenants, holding big banks accountable for the blight they cause, and bringing in $1.6 million in fees and penalties to Oakland thus far.

¡Alto a la PoliMigra! Though Governor Brown vetoed the Trust Act in August, we were heartened that the bill made it as far as it did, and we look forward to building on our strengthened alliances to continue fighting to end police and ICE collaboration in the Bay Area and throughout California. Our contributions helped to strengthen a more anti-racist approach to the work to pass local anti-detainer ordinances in Alameda and San Francisco.

Tenant Rights Clinics CJJC continues to provide free housing counseling and case management services to help low-income tenants and homeowners advocate for themselves when they face foreclosure, rent increases, evictions and harassment. For example, Maria Moctezuma was facing a sudden $1200 rent increase when her former landlord was foreclosed on, and US Bank became her new landlord. With CJJC’s support, Maria successfully pressured US Bank to drop the rent increase, allowing her and her family to stay in their home.
•    We saw over 1400 new and existing cases through the end of October alone in both clinics and helped many more people every day.

Now is a pivotal time to deepen your investment in building grassroots power of working class communities of color by joining the Just Cause Sustainer Circle, or by making a one-time contribution that is meaningful to you. Your support is critical to helping us continue to turn our freedom dreams into a vivid reality.  Thank you for everything you do to make this work possible!

Black-Brown Unity We believe that building deep solidarity between African-American and Latino communities is foundational to the development of a vibrant grassroots movement, but that unity can’t be built in the abstract. CJJC is actively forging those ties through joint organizing campaigns and collective political education. Check out Araceli Catalán’s article “CJJC Inspires Unity Between Latinos and African Americans” to learn more.

Your support  keeps CJJC going!  Please give today!  ¡La Unión Hace La Fuerza!