This article is part of Better Together — a storytelling series from the Center for Public Justice highlighting how faith-based organizations have partnered with government to see their communities flourish. Sharing Kathy Pointer’s Story South of the Anacostia River in Washington D.C., lines of people begin to form along Alabama Avenue SE every Tuesday morning. Some are students getting ready to start school. Some are waiting for the bus to go to work. And some on the corner of 9th Street SE and Alabama Avenue in front of Greater Fellowship Full Gospel Baptist Church are simply hungry and waiting for […]

From the beginning, God designed us to prosper in families, neighborhoods, and communities filled with care, structure, and purpose. Mental wellness, education, safety, and belonging are all part of God’s design for human flourishing. However, in a broken world, we see what happens when this vision fractures. This brokenness shows up in our schools, our families, and especially in our juvenile justice system. Many of the kids caught in that system live with intense emotional pain. Their stories often include trauma, abuse, abandonment, neglect, poverty, or violence. These kids didn’t just make a bad choice; they are children who often […]

This article is part of Better Together — a storytelling series from the Center for Public Justice highlighting how faith-based organizations have partnered with government to see their communities flourish. Telling the story of DC127 At the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, people gathered to remember and carry forward a movement. August 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. As thousands came to celebrate and to commission one another to realize the dream, another movement—oriented around caring for vulnerable children—was being birthed in […]

Escalating Disasters and FEMA Uncertainty “I have not been affected, why should I care?”, “I care about people before I worry about plants and animals.” These are the words of irritation and apathy toward environmental policy. Climate news and subsequent political implications generate a myriad of responses — frustration at partisan disagreement, suspicion toward those calling for action, and confusion about all the information available. Notably, a third of Americans express annoyance that these issues occupy so much attention.    But what about when disaster strikes?  In recent years, the number of devastating natural disasters have skyrocketed. National Centers for Environmental […]

To read the full research behind this op-ed, visit our 2025 Hatfield Prize page here. Often when we talk about access to healthcare, end-of-life care services go unmentioned. But as a hospice volunteer, I’ve learned that dying is the culmination of, not separate from, a robust continuum of care.  Today, with America’s rapidly growing population aged 65 and older and the current administration’s cuts to Medicaid, our reluctance to view hospice as an integral part of healthcare abandons both the dying and those caring for them, and betrays the ideals our government and society are built on.  The mission of hospice […]

To read the full research behind this op-ed, visit our 2025 Hatfield Prize page here. “I was sitting in my friend’s tent and had two big bags of clothes. No car, no money, wondering if this was going to be my life forever. Scared.” That is how my friend Rocky described what was going through his mind when he became homeless at the age of twenty-nine. Rocky’s journey to becoming housed took many turns, but ultimately it came down to the relationships he built at a weekly “neighborhood navigation center,” a Thursday night gathering of various nonprofits, case management services, and […]