Fighting injustice through our work

This morning I was thinking about why it is so important for me to be doing social justice work at this point in time. Every day when I read the news it seems like it gets worse and worse, the economy is collapsing and injustice is at every turn. There is this sort of dread that I have where I don’t want to go to CNN.com but feel like I have to. It reminds me a little of the game operation. I have a four year old son that has just learned the joys of that game. There is sort of hesitation because you want to pull out the funny bone or the spare rib but you are afraid of the consequences (that horrible noise and blinking nose). I also feel that way when I think about fighting injustice. Will my blog posting about racism in the nonprofit sector or a grant that we have made to increase Latino voting bring negative attention to the issue and actually make it harder to fight those injustices because people mobilize against it? So sometimes I feel like with traditional grantmaking you take a pass on those riskier grants when your hands are too shaky and you feel like you might set off the buzzer , what I have found with Headwaters is that our grantees do what my son does, they shut off the game, turn the whole board upside down and shake out what they need. Social justice is about changing the rules of the game when they are unfair.