Welcome to the website of Grand Valley Peace & Justice. We are a faith-based resource for social justice with ecumenical ties. Founded in 1990, our sponsors are the four Catholic Churches in Grand Junction, Fruita and Palisade, Colorado. Our mission is to catalyze: to raise consciousness, to educate and to challenge and lead the community to action in the prophetic stance and mandate of Catholic Social Teaching. Our commitment is manifest in a variety of projects throughout the year: a bi-monthly newsletter with distribution to over 300; public forums and speakers; films and discussion groups; vigils and demonstrations; letter writing campaigns and quarterly membership meetings.

We sponsor an annual Alternative Christmas Fair, an event that provides gifts for people in crises and gifts that protect and preserve the earth's environment. Last November, 2007, we raised almost $32,000 from this effort. We also sponsor an annual service trip to a community in Mexico, where we work for the local Habitat for Humanity alongside the townspeople to build houses for those with low income.

Because our location in Western Colorado is largely agricultural, we have been extremely active in immigrants' rights issues. This has included a major letter-writing campaign to Congress and visits to Senator Ken Salazar who worked on the congressional committee for comprehensive immigration reform. In order to increase our influence, we established the Western Colorado Justice for Immigrants Coalition. We continue to be active on this issue by organizing the regional migrant community at the grass roots level. Our representatives have organized several "Know Your Rights" forums and other informational workshops. In solidarity with the national movement, we helped organize a rally and march in the spring of 2006 - 5,000 supporters showed up, a number unprecedented in the area. As recently as January 16th, 2008 we worked with Global Exchange to bring in humanitarian and immigrants' rights activist, Ray Ybarra, who spoke to an audience that included several local Minutemen with whom we have worked to establish better understanding.

Our involvement with environmental issues has also been a priority here at the epicenter of oil and gas drilling. Mandated by national energy needs, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah are experiencing a boom of unprecedented proportion. We have joined with the regional community action environmental organization, Western Colorado Congress, to help establish regulations for protection of community quality of life. GVPJ played a large role in helping to protect our municipal watershed from the potential harm of drilling for natural gas there. We were also successful in preventing a toxic waste dump to be excavated in the nearby small town of DeBeque.

Voices for Creative Nonviolence co-founder, Kathy Kelly, has visited the area on three different occasions, presenting her experiences with the Iraqi people. She has a special love for young people and we arranged for interaction with students during her visits. In the same vein, we are hosting poet and activist David Smith-Ferri in April, who will tour Western Colorado with his powerful message of caring for the Iraqi refugees.

In order to expedite these and other activities, the GVPJ Board of Directors is very much a working board, consisting of activist community organizers. In response to many individual requests, we created a membership program in September of 2007. We currently have over fifty dues-paying members from different churches and walks of life. Fill out a membership form to keep up to date with current happenings.

Join us for our next general membership meeting on Wednesday, March 5th beginning at 7:00 pm in the Parish Hall of St. Joseph Church, 3rd & White Avenue, Grand Junction.

Grand Valley Peace & Justice is a faith based resource for social justice, established in 1990 by the four Catholic Churches in the Grand Valley . Our mission is to be a catalyst: to raise consciousness, to educate and to challenge and lead the local community to action in the prophetic stance and mandate of Catholic Social Teaching. In order to serve the common good of all, we invite all denominations and communities to join with us to effectively create and implement projects and programs on local, national and international justice issues.

Grand Valley Peace & Justice
gvpeace@acsol.net
www.gvpeacejustice.org
970-243-0209

contact Grand Valley Peace and Justice

last updated February 24, 2008

webmaster:Kathy Pike