OUR
STORY

Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE Justice) educates, organizes, and mobilizes religious leaders and community members to accompany immigrants, low-wage workers, and communities of color in struggles for justice, dignified working conditions, and community wellbeing. CLUE’s core work is relational faith-rooted organizing around strategic campaigns that seek to build the Beloved Community–the concept popularized by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that describes a society where everyone can thrive.

CLUE’s primary geographic area is Los Angeles and Orange Counties, and to a lesser degree Riverside and San Bernardino counties. CLUE partners with more than a dozen labor unions, 600+ religious leaders, and 150 houses of worship and community groups to fulfill its mission. Its work impacts hundreds of thousands of people each year.

In the last few years, we have helped win living wages and safer working conditions for hundreds of thousands of essential workers across Southern California. We have helped pass local ordinances and initiative campaigns related to keeping housing affordable and policing accountable, among other priorities. We welcomed more than 1,000 refugees and asylum seekers bussed from Texas as a political stunt and helped hundreds of others to get released from Adelanto Detention Center due to inhumane treatment and squalid conditions.

Integral to the organized, connected interfaith movement for justice is the work of building the next generation of organizers capable of participating in and leading justice campaigns. CLUE’s Rising Religious Leaders programs serve college students and career professionals alike. They train community members and faith leaders in strategic nonviolence, mutual aid practices, civil rights, and more.

Meanwhile struggles for fair work continue: for living wages and decent working conditions for all who live in and love our Southern California home.

Facing formidable opposition from local politicians and business leaders to a living-wage law in Los Angeles, progressive faith leaders and allies worked to convince a decisive majority of City Council members to support the measure and commit to overriding a threatened veto from then-Mayor Richard Riordan. “We pray for the poor, the unemployed, the oppressed. But pushing for implementation of the Living Wage Ordinance is a way to do something.” – Rev. Dick Gillett, 1996

The law passed in March 1997, assuring a livable wage for thousands and making it very clear that the progressive agenda needed religious voices. A conversation began among clergy, social justice advocates and union members with a view to create a faith-based nonprofit to organize the faith community to advocate for worker justice.

Rev. Alexia Salvatierra, a Lutheran pastor, became CLUE’s first full-time director. She developed a theory of social change, rooted in faith and scripture, that combined the moral authority and witness of faith traditions with real-world political advocacy for workers. The vision: Creating a Just and Sacred Society.

Those early CLUE clergy and lay leaders blocked streets, met with politicians, and opened space for negotiation among employers and workers, figuring in some of the most important social justice struggles in Southern California in recent decades.

CLUE was a major force in the New Sanctuary movement, where churches provided refuge for persecuted immigrants, helped with unionizing efforts in Santa Monica and Anaheim hotels and resorts, and advocated for important local and state laws that protect workers and immigrants, including a $15 per hour local minimum wage in Los Angeles

and a state law that separates the function of local police and federal immigration agents.
The Black Jewish Justice Alliance (BJJA) was founded; a faith-rooted coalition dedicated to rebuilding the historic social justice partnership between Black and Jewish leaders. CLUE partnered with the:Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Southern California Dignity and Power Now Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice Youth Justice Coalition

Through the BJJA, more than 50 rabbinical signatures were secured for a letter to the Los Angeles County
Board of Supervisors demanding a Civilian Oversight Commission for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which was established in 2016. Since then, the BJJA has convened around issues of ending gun violence, checking law enforcement and over-policing of communities, and ending the mass jailing of people of color.

CLUE continues our commitment to walk alongside low-wage workers, immigrants, and Angelenos who are fighting for a better tomorrow. Our growing community of faith and lay leaders attend protests, work on mutual aid initiatives, participate in policy lobbying as well as direct action and civil disobedience. Through all that we do, we bring values from our diverse faith traditions to the front, as a moral compass through which to view civic action. We hope you will join us in creating a more just and sacred society for all.