Dear Friend,

Congress is expected to vote in the coming days on the next coronavirus stimulus package. This round is expected to largely deal with an increase in funding to assist small businesses. While additional support to small businesses is important, now is the time to raise our voices together to ensure that other urgent and critical needs are addressed in this next round.

Please help us in advocating for:

• Increased support and funding to the healthcare system and medical workers to ensure our medical professionals have what they need to do their jobs safely and treat infected patients — including greater access to PPE, ventilators, and other necessary medical equipment.
• Dramatically increased testing through federally coordinated efforts, to ensure we have reliable and holistic data to inform public health experts’ decisions to ease and lift restrictions.
• Increased racial and demographic data to better understand the racial disparities around testing and treatment and help inform future support to the communities and groups that are being disproportionately impacted.
• Ensure a free, fair, and safe election in November by including at least $4 billion in additional funding for election preparedness and mandating that states expand voter registration, recruit additional poll workers, and implement in-person early voting, no-excuse absentee voting by mail, voter education, and safe in-person voting on Election Day.
• Increasing SNAP benefits by 15 percent to meet individual food needs and bolster local economies and businesses.
• Protect immigrant families by the release of all detained children, families, and adults, so they can stay safe and healthy. Allow free access to medical tests and healthcare for all members of the immigrant community, allow families who filed taxes with Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITIN) to receive a stimulus check, so all American children can be protected, and suspend the public charge rule.

This pandemic has revealed the inequities and injustices that have for too long existed in our country. Though the virus may not discriminate, our systemic and structural injustices do. And in the United States this means that those who are bearing the brunt of the impact of this disease are those who have been historically, structurally, systemically, and even politically marginalized and oppressed. We must address the real needs of impacted communities — especially those who have been left out of past negotiations.

We don’t expect this to be the last round of stimulus, and we will continue to fight for these critical needs in later negotiations if they are not addressed in this round.

In faith,

Rev. Adam Taylor
Executive Director