Let's Talk Faith and Justice

Lyndon Sayers 0:13
Welcome to Let's Talk faith and justice. I'm Lyndon Sayers, the other co host is Boston Lafferty, not joining us this morning. And with me, I'm on location here with David Barrow, who's the regional director of the Industrial Areas Foundation Pacific. He's in town from Australia, mentoring, supporting organizer and leaders of greater Victoria, acting together, known as GVAT coalition of faith groups, community organizations and unions working together for the common good on issues like housing and climate resilience through a process called community organizing. David's also a storyteller, Unionist member of the queer community and in leadership and the Uniting Church in Australia, welcome David

David Barrow 1:02
g'day and Kia ora, thanks for having me.

Lyndon Sayers 1:06
Well, as we get into it, I'm really curious to hear. I met you at a queer collective retreat at the Unitarian Church here on West Saanich road outside Victoria, and you were keen to chat this morning and hear a bit more of your work. So maybe you can tell us a bit about how the Pacific region you're overseeing organization in Victoria, BC, and you're located in Australia.

David Barrow 1:35
Yeah. So maybe if I give a picture of what community organizing looks like. Imagine a massive gym with two basketball courts in size, and imagine 900 people have gathered. We're in Sydney. It's in March of this year, and you've got 180 people in black T shirts from the Uniting Church, which is similar to the United Church in Canada, and they're Tongan and South Asian and Anglo and Pacifica, and then you've got Unionists in their red T shirts and their flags, and then you've got the Asylum Seeker Resource Center, and then you've got Catholics in their blue scarves, and then you've got Baptists in their teal T shirts, and then you've got the renters union in their bright red activist T shirts and so on and so forth. 44 different organizations on the stage. You've got bishops and other people in funny hats. You've got Secretaries of trade unions, and you have co chairs young and old, five of them representing that diversity. One's a nun, one's a electrician from Western Sydney. One is a young person who works with the Catholic community. Another one's a volunteer coordinator at a homeless shelter, and they are pinning a senior member of the federal government. His name's Chris Bowen. He's the Federal Minister for Climate Change and what pinning is is in front of this great cohort of people with their full diversity, is asking that politician to give a commitment to something specific and actionable. And for us, in this particular moment in Sydney, it was about access to affordable renewables. Now, on the night, he said, "No, I can't make that commitment tonight." But a week later, he sends a video out, because it's election period. He sends a video out to us and to the hunter Community Alliance, which is where I'm based, up in Newcastle, the world's largest coal port, where we do this organizing as well. And he says, thanks to the Sydney Alliance and the hunter Community Alliance for pushing me. Today, I'm announcing $2.3 billion worth of batteries for home, for homes. And we know from our power analysis and our political understanding that it was our actions that made that happen. And this process is called community organizing, and my job is to bring all those diverse groups, Muslims and Jewish and Christian and Hindu and unionists and atheist community sector members and environmentalists and disability groups and indigenous folks together. Our job as organizers, to bring those folks together and help them work together, to do this work, to build alliances, strengthen their organizations, identify civic leaders and get real outcomes for working people. And so I am here because greater Victoria acting together, which is across the nine municipalities of lower Vancouver Island, has is an organization like that. And Izzy Adachi is the organizer here, who I think has been on your program before, and my job is to support her, as well as 14 other organized cities that have cities around the Pacific region. Including Oregon and Washington and Montana, BC, Alberta, Australia and New Zealand. So it's a very unique region, but we're connected by Te Moana, or in the language of my mother's father's people the ocean, and they're from Aotearoa, New Zealand. So I'm both Australian and my whakapapa, my ancestry is from New Zealand.

Lyndon Sayers 5:20
Oh, that's great, great to bring that representation and voice. You mentioned community organizing, like, often that's used as, like, a general category, but is this a technical kind of program that you're describing in particular with your work?

David Barrow 5:40
Yeah. So I mean, when I tell people at parties I'm an organizer, they think, first, is this something to do with Tupperware or, like, shelves? And, you know, house organizing No. Community Organizing is a discipline, and what we do in the Industrial Areas Foundation is broad based organizing. Community organizing is different from mobilizing, if you think mobilizing is mass numbers of people on the street, but they don't necessarily know each other, and the decision maker isn't there. Organizing is a process of starting with relationships, and it's how I, as an openly gay man married to a man, is able to be in relationship with Muslim Imams, conservative Catholic priests, Orthodox Jewish folks, Baptist pastors who do not agree with me on gender issues or issues of sexuality, but we can find common ground on housing, on early childhood access, on the impact of, you know, the fires on Australia and the ash and having government approach to helping people in their day to day lives, we do that by building relationships, telling stories of where we've come from and who we are. We then go to listening where we unpack. We ask the question, we get our people to unpack the pressures in their lives. What's the pressure on your family right now? What are you experiencing privately that actually is a public issue and that listening takes place, and gvats just done that process. And unsurprisingly, the issues for Victoria are housing, the lack of affordable housing, the rental issues and the impacts of climate change. They're really hitting people hard. And then we work out, okay, well, there's lots of people doing things on general issues. What is the specific, measurable thing that we can actually get? And we're very specific, and we're very, I guess, professional, but also intentional about how and what we want to ask. So we'll ask a politician, will you support the end of no grounds eviction in New South Wales in the upcoming 2023 election, including at the end of periodic leases. Right? This was our big win in 2023 and you know, often they say no, but sometimes in front of 1000 people, they say yes, and we catch it on film. And then after the election or after the budget process, we follow up, follow up, follow up. The reason we can follow up is that it's not just a collection of random individuals. It is a coalition of institutions, of mosques and churches and unions, places with buildings and staff and programs and ongoing commitment through their mission and vision and values. And that's what makes it more permanent, because you can get lots of people on the street, but where will they be next week? Is the question, this is a different tool in the toolbox.

Lyndon Sayers 8:28
Yeah, that that makes sense thinking about that conversation, and can imagine there can be overlap between mobilizing people to get noise out in the streets and the some of the more long term goals of organizing that you're describing that require a bit more institutional support.

David Barrow 8:49
Well, on that, I mean, we say that and an organized alliance can mobilize, but a mobilized group can't organize, because at the center of organizing is the commitment to relationship and permanent, consistent action. And so when COVID hit in Sydney, for example, we had a coalition ready to go, and we had ended up being able to bring 180 organizations nationally together online, of course, because it was COVID. And my colleague Deanna Olmos, at that time, she was an intern with the Sydney Alliance. She was a Colombian migrant to Australia, and the government said that she would not be extended job keeper and that all temporary migrants needed to go home. Well, there was no way for her to go home. And suddenly we had 500 to 600,000 people completely without support during COVID. This network of organizations that were in relationship before COVID Hit were able to jump into the fray. Organize across Australia and Deanna was part of securing $34 million in emergency aid because we were able to do that.

Lyndon Sayers 10:02
Yeah, that's a remarkable kind of support, and something you can't do as an individual group, where these things feel too daunting. Curious to hear a bit about how you. You talked a bit about bridging gaps. So two that come to mind. One, you mentioned there's people who are going to have different understanding of social issues you mentioned, whether groups are queer affirming or not, and you're still able to work on shared interests, like housing. I mean, there's some currents in leftist organizing that would see that as anathema to say that we compromise on nothing, and we're just, we're not going to talk to people who who have such radically divergent views on inclusion than we do. So what? What do you say to that that you're, I don't know if you've heard like accusations of like selling out. You're making these compromises with groups with radically different views, and that's somehow selling out on inclusion that you yourself are a queer person. I imagine this is something that's come up for you.

David Barrow 11:18
Oh, totally, totally. We don't ask anyone to compromise on their values. We don't ask anyone who comes into these alliances to compromise on who they are. What we ask is that people who come to this table suspend judgment and open their ears to listen to hear the stories of the other. In that space, as you hear the story of a Muslim imam or a Catholic conservative Catholic person, you'll hear part of their humanity that would otherwise be clouded if we're talking on Twitter or x or whatever it's called now, or social media, or, you know, in the opinion pages of a newspaper, we ask instead that you encounter the other they have to. They have to. It's hard for them too. I mean, for some of them, being in the room with a queer person is, you know, might be against everything that they've learned or been taught or been brought up in. So it's hard for them, but they know that no one's going to be bringing those issues into the space in the sense of that's not what the alliance is going to work on. But you and your identity is whole. You don't have to not be trans or not be queer or not be a feisty feminist, you know, leader in the Alliance, you can't expect those values of the other in the same way that they can't expect their values on you. And if you can do that, and if you can be in that conversation, as hard as it is, and it's not for everyone, right? Like if you've just come out, or you're just working out your gender identity, maybe the Alliance space is not quite where you want to be, because you're still not processed. And I have experienced the benefit of autonomous organizing separate you know, I've needed those spaces. I've needed queer spaces, right? But this is one tool, right? Because we can't fix housing unless we work together. And housing is a housing is a queer issue. We need community as queer people. We need communities of safety in urban areas, but we can't afford to live in urban areas. So if we can't work with other folks who care about housing to win, then you know we've got to really think and reflect about whether our values and whether our even our ideology, is being put into practice or not, or are we just happy to sit around and have a good, you know, whinge, as we were saying Australia, and if you have this word, whinge, do you have whinge? You know, a wine, yeah, sit around and whine about it and talk about how wonderful the revolution will be in the future, in some far distant future,

Lyndon Sayers 14:01
Right. So I'm thinking, because there's the alliance of the different groups, you can have the full out, overtly queer affirming groups that are nurturing queer spaces, and then representatives of those groups could attend Alliance gathering who feel comfortable doing so. So it's not an all or nothing thing is what it sounds like, because I do think this is a real barrier to organizing. I think about it in terms of, like how we've tried to talk about Israel and Gaza on here, and anytime it comes up on social media, for me, at least, it devolves into just a horrible mess of stuff, even if we share so much in common, often we're on the same side of the issue, but for the kind of purest ideologues like budging a single millimeter is anathema. And they'll kind of just ice you out. But when you're in a room together, talking face to face, there's better chance of finding that common ground than purely on an online platform. Always seems to be an experience with that other one. So we've talked a bit about maybe how you interface between different groups people can feel safe in their spaces, and those who feel confident or comfortable to branch out could maybe represent some of those queer groups. What about the intergenerational because this is something we're both leaders in, in churches and also in other kind of community spaces that often we we see things breaking along generational lines, where, oh, this is this gathering is for older people, and the students might not show up to that, or this is a student led gathering, and then it's mostly students and not others. So how do you how do you break down those barriers so that groups feel like they're being heard and it's worth their time.

David Barrow 16:03
Great question. Well, let's just take a step back and have a big look at what's happening with institutions. Institutions the world over, whether it's scouts or Kiwanis or lions, club or political parties, churches or unions, are in decline, not everywhere, of course, but institutional decline. And it's not Millennials fault that that's happening. The baby boomers, more or less walked away from institutions, and yet that and then continued, and their kids didn't get brought up in institutions. I mean, sometimes I feel like I'm a bit of a strange millennial, because I grew up in 10 different institutions, you know, community sport and scouting and church and the local theater club. And that is not the experience of people of my generation, mostly people of my generation and younger have had much less exposure to civic life, perhaps in something like Victoria. That may not be the case, I don't know, but what we have now is the situation where most people aren't involved in institutions, and younger people, millennials and zeds, have an have a standing bias against institutions. We talked about earned mistrust, and there's plenty of earned mistrust from civic institutions, but this is something different. This is unearned mistrust, the idea that I can't be part of a organization because it's inherently flawed or because it will never live up to its ideals. And that translates into everything, including, like Millennials not really being big fans of group work at university, and we see each year it gets harder and harder for people to work together, because they haven't grown the muscles of being in institutional life. We have across the Asia, across the Pacific area that I mentioned, very similar dynamics, very similar culture. And what we see is that there are people in institutions, a much smaller number of millennials and Zs, and of course, some x is still still with us, and we are faced with a future where institutions will look different and will be smaller, and we see that particularly in the church. What we know from every experience of dictatorship and tyranny around the world is that it is institutions, not individuals, that can stand against it. We think about the church or the unions or Muslim folks in in different parts of Asia Pacific region, region where it's East Timor, or even in Indonesia, Papua or Fiji, Philippines, in all of those places, it's organized people who meet regularly, who can build that collective power to to stand against excesses of the market or excesses of government. So we see that even in the United States, particularly with the Very Reverend Bishop bug, who's was the first person in Trump's new presidency to stand up and speak. But could she have done that without the church? Could she have done that without the institution? Could the unions, you know, mount, could the unions of Korea have stopped? Well, it's pardon me. Could the could the Koreans have stopped a dictatorship from happening in South Korea if the Hyundai union of workers didn't threaten to take a million people off the job? Right? That happened, and the next day it was resolved. So institutions are important. This links to intergenerational because part of the impact, if you're not in an institution, you're probably not getting exposed to intergenerational places and spaces. One of the things that's so exciting about gvat is that you've got because I guess it's Victoria, you've got a bunch of young people and a bunch of older people and a few people in the in between. And it's a really vibrant place where people are listening and learning to each other, learning from each other, Across Ages, and that's something that, you know, particularly in the queer community. I think that's something that really special to have an intergenerational space, because typically our friendship groups are, you know, people that are kind of very similar to you, similar age, and you might go out to a drink at the Vicious Poodle, I think I went there on the weekend, right? Um, but you're not necessarily sharing in that greater, broader age range.

Lyndon Sayers 20:32
Yeah, that that sounds that rings true from from things I've heard from folks, and good to think about bridging those things. And what would be some words of encouragement for for folks who maybe aren't sure about institutions, because you do hear about, like people finding community among friends groups, and whether it's, you know, going out for drinks, or going out camping together, or doing kind of more friends group things of exploring, like, it's not always a shortage of money, like some things are expensive and right, some people don't have the money for those experiences. But I find like there are younger working folks who have resources and will travel up the island or to the Lower Mainland or fly somewhere. And so the resources are there to take in varied experiences and kind of recharge that way. But for some, there's a reluctance to commit to a larger organization outside their work or studies, again, maybe for some of the reasons you you mentioned that there could be either a cynicism or some some of those barriers, I just wonder as again, thinking of of organizers and church leaders, what are things we could do to not the not the obvious things are like, well, let's make church cool, or let's make organizing cool. That never works, right? It does have to be based around relationship and trust and so, yeah, I'm just curious if there are some things you've found stories that that work for for outreach.

David Barrow 22:30
There's two, two parts to your question there. One is what's encouragement for people who are not in institutions, and the other is for people who are in institutions, who want more people to become part of them. If you're not in an institution, start where you are. Start with your union in your workplace or your Student Association. The thing that makes going out for a camp with your friends different to going to a summer camp for, you know, with people who might be like, if you've got a disability, other people with disabilities, or organizing a, you know, a queer retreat, which is an institutional engagement, right? It's is that in private life, we tend to find people like us. They might be our age, they might have our interests like our hobbies, or be similar in our view, institutional life is more public. We tend to have more diversity in those institutions. There might be there's obviously something that binds us, whether it's our faith or our identity or an activity, but there is a difference. There is a fiber. There's a different fiber, you know, like so you go to church and you meet someone who might be a conservative, or you go to your queer group and there might be someone from a different culture, or you go to your union and you are talking to someone who is security guard and you're a upper middle class manager, but you're in the same union, and this experience of difference is critical to finding meaning. Meaning in democracy requires us to know our neighbors, to know the people who are different from us. Otherwise, we can get pure and we can stay in our echo chamber and we never have to compromise. This aversion to compromise, to me, is linked to people's social media, but not just way of just talking to people we know, and you learn how to compromise in an institution. And not all institutions are going to be right for you. So find one that works. And if you're a person, if you're a queer person. I mean, there are a lot of faith institutions here that are very queer friendly. I mean, Victoria is an amazing place to come out, or amazing place to discover your gender, compared to pretty much everywhere else in the world. I would say. If you're an institutional leader, I guess that my agitation for you is like, go and meet. People, one to one and have a relational meeting. There is no growth of an institution without relationships. And modernism says that you can just create this bureaucratic you know that organizations have a mission, and people should come for the mission. No organizations are relational. You've got to go and meet with people. Every church that has grown in Sydney through the Sydney Alliance has done so because the ministers and the leadership, lay leadership will go and meet for people for coffee and find out about their story. And people feel, you know, recognized. Most people feel unseen in our society. And so a union leader or or a community organization leader taking the time to go and meet with someone who's turned up or signed up at a stall or turned up at their door or whatever that is the work of building institutions, because organizations are fundamentally relationships and a goal. If they don't have a goal, it's a camping trip with friends. If it's just a goal, it burns people out and people disappear after a while, organizations require both relationships and a goal.

Lyndon Sayers 26:05
Yeah, that really rings true. And I think the challenge is being consistent with balancing those two things, building relationships, having the goal, make sure it's nurturing for people that that there are the retreats, there are the coffee meetups that aren't just kind of business, and we've all been in institutional spaces that are purely administrative, and we've sometimes been to our own church spaces higher up. And I think what, what is happening here? It's a business office. Yeah, there needs to be more life here. I was thinking about some other topics. I'd be interested to hear about some of your faith experience. You mentioned it briefly at the queer collective retreat at the Unitarian Church, and you've got some experience with campus ministry as well. It sounds like,

David Barrow 27:01
yeah, so, so I grew up in Paradise [Southern Australia]. I guess it was a place not unlike Victoria. It was about an hour and a half north of Sydney, beaches, mangroves, estuaries, bush, suburbia. And dad was an atheist, and mum was at that time, kind of a cultural Christian. We went along to kind of Episcopal Anglican style church that was very ho hum every day, Family Church. I had an experience of the Holy Spirit at 14. And I'm a joiner, you might have picked up this sense. So I was like, God, this is so lame. I had an experience that was so profound that I was I remember walking out into this lagoon at sunset and just saying to God, fine, I guess I'm joining the church, but it'll be faith seeking understanding, because up in my brain, I don't know how Adam and Eve is meant to work, or Noah, or all of that doesn't make much scientific sense, but my heart has been moved this feeling of majesty, of connection, of the Holy Spirit, of something divine. I know not everyone has those experiences, but for me, it was profound. I went along and got went through confirmation classes and was confirmed in my church, surrounded by the people who'd brought me up, and the bishop had come down from Newcastle, and he pointed his finger at me, and he said, and you are loved by God. For a young queer kid in circa 2000 2001 maybe it was really profound. And then within nine months of that, a new minister had come from a conservative, or came into leadership from a conservative, Anglican perspective, and I was no longer welcome at that church. No longer welcome to preach up the up to speak up the front, to do the prayers up the front. And there was a moment where that came to a head in front of the congregation, and I was humiliated. Now, to his credit, he came and asked for my forgiveness that night, you know, six foot tall, white establishment guy getting down his knees to me, a Pimply, skinny gay, you know, effeminate kid, 15 or something. And I said, Arthur, I can intellectually forgive you. I just don't know if I can ever look at you again. I'm so hurt. To his credit, he came and we sat and we we spoke about faith, but at that point, he couldn't imagine what it would be for a practicing gay to be a practicing Christian, and I'd done a lot of theological reading, so I said, I think we're going to have to part ways. Here we went. I went church hopping and shopping at the same time I'm getting angry. Angry about the way the world is. I mean, I'm 15. I've had this experience at church. I've got a sociology teacher who's opening my mind to what's happening where it's the drum beat towards the Iraq War. At this point, there's a lot of stuff going on in Australia where people are being racially vilified. And I become kind of a liberal, I guess, and very angry. But in those final years, I started to see how the economy really was affecting my friends differently based on their parents income. And my friends who had rich parents got everything they want. They went to university. My friends who from poor backgrounds went into unionized bullcrap jobs. You know, that were just not very sustainable for them or their families. So I got to uni, got involved in the student movement after vowing to just get my degree and get out, you know, I was like, I did everything as an extracurricular nerd. I did not need to do that at uni. Well, within two weeks, I was occupying the Chancellery. You know, I was in the revolution and having a great time getting pepper sprayed and doing completely frivolous activist things that felt really good, but were actually making it easier for the Conservative government at that time to push through the privatization of higher education and in this very Les Miserables up on the barricades, kind of poetic time In my life, I found a Bible study run by the Uniting Church, and I discovered the radical Jesus. And this was not the Jesus of scones and cordial and hymns, boring hymns. I love hymns now, but that time I was like, whatever. And it wasn't, but it also wasn't the Jesus of, you know, guns and white Jesus. And we have this, these phrases, my four and no more kind of privatized faith. And there's a waltzing. Matilda is a song. And so we talk about waltzing materialism. You know that this church that is okay with prosperity, it wasn't that either. It was the Christ that gets people out of Central America up into Canada through the under the modern underground railroad. And it was about Dorothy Day and that Martin Luther King was a reverend. I mean, I didn't know that, you know, because he's been stripped of all of his faith context in Australia, discovering that the New Testament is one of the most revolutionary books in history, and the opening line in Mark where Jesus comes out of the bush down to the disciples who are fishing so they're at work in an exploitative system. Right next to, you know, the big Sephora, a big Roman city that was built on the the ruins of a place where there was Jewish rebellion, and Jesus worked on that city, probably as a carpenter. He comes out and says, It ain't the Emperor's time. It's God's time. Get ready for the revolution. Put down your nets and follow me immediately. And they go to the center of political power and theological power in Jerusalem, and the Messiah is executed by the state on the town garbage dump. And I remember I'd come into this Bible study by accident in my red t shirt with my red leaflets, and it was like something jumped out of the text and slapped me in the face. So I put down the leaflets, and I said, Tell me more. I'm in. So that was 21 years ago. I was celebrated for my sexuality in the Uniting Church. I it was a church that acted. It was not only doing activism, but also organizing, and it had an intellectual fiber to it. It wasn't just, you know, kindergarten answers for really complex adult questions and community. My ego got too big because I went on to become the president of the National Union of Students, right? So I was very involved in student activism that, you know, they'd pop it with a sardonic or sarcastic remark because they loved me. So always hope that you have friends that love you enough to tell you you're an asshole. Sorry, I have to cut that. But anyway. And so, yeah. And so then that experience of radical discipleship, which was neither liberal and giving up on, you know, giving up on Jesus's resurrection and what that means, nor conservative which condemns people, but something deeper and different, and ended up, for my sins, on the standing committee of the Uniting Church in New South Wales. I was the lead organizer of the Sydney Alliance, as I shared, and then starting to apply community organizing to church growth. And go back to this question of because this is a big work around isn't it, but to go back to this question of making church cool, it's like, you know, that's not about it. Millennials and Zeds want authenticity. The church needs to be the authentic self, and in that culture of anti that unearned mistrust of institutions, the church needs to be authentic. Radically and radically itself in public life. It is not enough to have the Holy huddle on a Sunday. The Church must be active and visible and connected to its faith, like not just a justice junkie, but connected to its faith in public life. And what I see through these alliances is that the church can do that in that big story I told at the beginning of the big gymnasium, my own congregation was there with 30 people who turned out in their like heart uniting T shirts in rainbow print, you know. And that act of standing with others who are not Christians as a Christian is incredibly powerful moment of formation. So I invite people who are curious about that sort of thinking to get involved in gvat here and see what might be possible. Yeah,

Lyndon Sayers 35:54
well, you got me interested in thinking about that. So there you go. And certainly there's several people who loop me into their emails and keep me in the loop. So that's that's good. Well, thank you for for sharing that it gives I think, it gives us all something to think about. And I think breaking down the barriers is a theme you keep coming back to, and how religious spaces can cut through some of the political ideological divides as well. Again, it's not about just centrism or finding the middle path that compromises people's values. As you said, people can be fully themselves and to be the representative who goes into the big space and meeting with people very different. You know, people will find their calling, if that's their thing. If others need to be in a queer only space and get built up, u h, that's okay, too. So everyone just needs to find their place in this. It's not just a one track path, yes,

David Barrow 36:57
but also, we got problems that need fixing, right? And like, you know, and I know we're running out of time, but in Victoria, you've got a housing crisis, which is going to make it almost impossible for queer young people to live here, probably already. You've got a climate crisis that's going to hit your water, and, you know, your air quality with the fires and all of that. And so the question is, what are you going to do about that? Are you going to be organized as people? It's like not enough to lick our wounds. If you are ready to step into public life, you are needed, and you are called. I would hope, if you're a person of faith, for sure, you're called. And if you're still working it out, take the time you need, but don't take too long, because actually, we need everyone to lean in right now. And Victoria is one of the most amazing places on the planet I've discovered in the last five days, and more people should be able to be here to enjoy that. It shouldn't just be the sanctuary of the rich. To do that, you're going to need to change some laws and change some budgets, and that's going to require a culture of accountability and follow up that I'm not sure is necessarily in the water here yet in Victoria, and I'd love to see young people who might be listening, or the church folks kind of, yeah, help this place pull up its socks. It matters to us, because BC is where the environment movement really got its start, you know, started. So this is a place that can be an example for the rest of the world. So that is an opportunity for Victoria to take a step up, then for the people living here to take a step in.

Lyndon Sayers 38:36
Great. Well, on that note, let's wrap it up and a good segue to invite Izzy idiacci on here to keep talking about some of the gvat practical programs that are underway on housing and climate. All right. Thanks so much David for taking time today. Where can people find you online?

David Barrow 38:59
IAFpacific.org, that's IAFPacific, as in the ocean.org but better connect with Izzy here in GVA and get connected to what we're doing.

Lyndon Sayers 39:09
Got it. Well, and as always, our thank yous to CFUV for hosting the podcast to the BC Synod Bishop Kathy in the Lower Mainland Lutheran Church of the cross and multi-faith UVic. Thanks everyone and keep listening and follow us @letstalkfaithjustice on Instagram. Peace.