An Open Invitation to my McCormick Family

Photo credit: elycefeliz, flickr.com

By: Ryan Wallace
This year, I'm doing my field education at a not-for-profit called Protestants for the Common Good (PCG).  It’s a remarkable organization, and quite honestly, I think it would be difficult for me to overstate the importance of the work PCG does. Our mission is to look at public policy issues from a Christian perspective, advocate social reforms that will serve the common good, and educate and involve churches throughout this process. We work on a wide range of policy initiatives, from environmental laws to tax reform, health care justice to systemic racism in drug offense sentencing. One reform that I’ve spent a lot of time on lately is a proposal to raise the minimum wage in Illinois. Did you know that a full-time minimum wage worker only makes about $17,000 a year before taxes? Can you imagine trying to raise a child or two on that salary?

At this point, I’m sure you’re starting to wonder why I’m telling you about my field site. Well, here it is. PCG is having a 15 year anniversary celebration and they’d like to invite you to come—yes, you! There will be lots of food and drink, it’ll be a great opportunity to network with some amazing people from all over the state, but more than anything, it would be a chance to learn about how this organization has put Christian faith into action in the public square. The celebration will take place this Sunday, November 6 at 4pm at Saint Pauls United Church of Christ in Lincoln Park. Tickets are normally $75 a person, but because PCG would love to have some seminarians there (and they know seminarians aren’t exactly the wealthiest bunch of people), they want to give us the chance to come for anything between $0-75, whatever you feel you can afford. The bottom line is that they don’t want anyone to be deterred by the cost. So if you’re interested in what PCG is doing but don’t feel like you can afford to pay anything at the moment, they want you to come anyway.

If you have any questions or you’d like to register to come to the celebration, please email me this week at rwallace@go.mccormick.edu. And if you’re interested in learning more about PCG, I encourage you to check out our website and/or our blog. I’ll be posting a new blog piece on why we should raise the minimum wage in the next couple days, and I would love to start a conversation about it at McCormick to consider how we might support the campaign as a community.