As executive director of Vermont Interfaith Action, Debbie Ingram knows the 15,000 Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish and Muslim members of her grassroots organizing group are outnumbered in what the latest census found to be one of the nation’s least religious states.
“However, it doesn’t mean Vermonters are not people of faith expressed in other ways, like through the beauty of creation or living and letting live,” Ingram said. “There are people of goodwill who can come together around shared values.”
That’s why the spiritual coalition is renewing its statewide push for social and economic justice by promoting affordable housing, racial equity, immigrants’ rights and corrections reforms.
“There’s still so much action left to take,” Ingram said at the group’s annual convention this month.
The state coalition is part of Faith in Action, a national nonpartisan network linking 1,000 religious congregations in nearly 50 regional branches.
“We evaluate what’s going on in the world around us and direct the decision about what action to take in response,” said Ingram, an ordained minister and former Chittenden County state senator. “We’re poised to do some good work.”
Members from more than 70 spiritual communities from Brattleboro to Burlington, for example, are lobbying state leaders to invest more in permanent shelter for people without it.
“Not only is it the morally right thing to do, but it is also the economically right thing to do,” the group wrote in a recent report.
Faith leaders argue that allocating money for permanent shelter costs less than the current practice of spending as much as $200,000 in federal money nightly to shelter homeless people in hotels and motels.
“Providing stable housing reduces the downstream costs of poor physical and mental health, substance use disorders, educational support for students whose primary challenge is chaos and trauma, and ultimately, the costs in our criminal justice and corrections systems,” they wrote in their report.
The coalition has authored a second report calling for corrections reforms, including more educational and therapeutic opportunities for people in prison and more staff training about “restorative and better-informed methods of interaction with residents.”
“If staff are not trained in wellness for themselves, it is difficult for them to instill wellness in the corrections residents,” members wrote in the report. “The basis of treating the residents should be helping them become the best persons they can be.”
The coalition, meeting online after recently hosting a public Covid-19 memorial service in Montpelier, also is promoting racial justice and immigrants’ rights in the nation’s second-whitest state.
“I have grown into thinking of our role as the moral conscience of Vermont,” Ingram said. “We go over and over our own motivations to make sure that, even when we’re doing the right thing, we’re also doing it for the right reasons.”
