Community Unity Initiative

UAAMAC calls for our community to come together in the spirit of unity, collective work, and responsibility to address the need for radical reform in five key areas of our communal and civic lives considered to be essential in building The Beloved Community: – economic development, public education, family stability, public health, and the judicial system. Our outreach and advocacy thrust is:

Ongoing research on the best and most promising practices in the aforementioned areas of community engagement;

Ongoing research on the best and most promising practices being employed to address the deficiencies in systems that negatively impact our lives;

Ongoing outreach and recruitment of people with goodwill, resources and a demonstrated commitment to improving the lives of our citizens; and

The creation of an infrastructure whereby the masses of our people can participate in structured, informed and collective action to change their minds and lifestyles making it possible to confront and change the institutional arrangements which are responsible for our current situation.

Please join us in our efforts to create a better life for ourselves and future generations.

Health Disparities Project

”Of all forms of injustice, inequality in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

UAAMAC seeks to engage leaders and others in the health care community to address the disparities that exist within the southeast San Diego community:

  • Food Desert – the lack of grocery stores that provide fresh vegetables and fruits and other food products that promote healthy diets;
  • Healthy Life-Style – promoting exercise and testing of blood pressure and blood sugar and monitoring progress;
  • Collaboration – create a working group of Faith-Based Organizations (FBO) to maintain awareness of the various illnesses affecting our citizens and recommend appropriate resources;
  • Medical Advocacy – address eight devastating health issues in our community: HIV/AIDS, prostate cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, STDs, illiteracy, violence, and homelessness.

Judicial Reform

”Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

UAAMAC seeks to partner with those who are engaged in the struggle to create and administer a system of justice that recognizes the dignity and worth of all peoples. We will accomplish this by:

  • Fighting against societal practices and legislative policies that deny equal treatment to all our citizens in the streets, courts and other like venues in this country;
  • Supporting effective citizen review boards that monitor and restrain those entities that participate in the miscarriage of justice on all levels;
  • Proposing and encouraging legislative remedies that will address the disproportionate profiling, convictions and sentencing of persons of color;
  • Drawing on the best of our social justice traditions to develop and implement policies, practices and programs that will ensure and maintain a system of justice as an inalienable right for all persons;
  • Work to bring about the humane treatment of persons who are currently in the state’s penal system and encourage the development of strategies that remove barriers to their successful reentry into the community and world of work.

Gun Exchange

Since gun violence has become a public safety issue, UAAMAC has taken the initiative to get the guns off the streets of Southeast San Diego by hosting an annual event by which persons with weapons and ammunition can bring them to a location within the community and turn them in “No questions asked, no ID required, just get those guns in.” This has been a collaboration between the County District Attorney San Diego Police Department, and the County Sheriff.

Family Stability

”What hypocrisy it is to talk of saving the new generation to make it a generation of hope
—while consigning it to unemployment and provoking it to violent alternatives

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The goal of the family stability efforts is to engage in strategies that build, maintain and develop caring and loving families. We will do this by:

  • Being better parents, both social and biological, ourselves
  • Ensuring that resources necessary for good parenting are available
  • Working with parents/guardians and progressive professionals in the field of family life to develop instructional materials on parenting
  • Establishing mentoring programs and rites of passage programs
  • Recommending best practices manuals on parenting, marriage, and how to best care for and protect the most vulnerable among us: the young, the seasoned and the disabled.
  • Monitoring and encouraging improvement upon legislation/policies that will address how foster care children and their caretakers are treated
  • Establishing bridges between generations upon which the transference of wisdom, knowledge and experience may safely cross.

Public Education

”Education either... is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity, or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Paulo Freire

UAAMAC’s goal in this effort is to encourage and support radical reform in the public education system and create a system that will educate our children to be academically competent and socially and morally responsible. UAAMAC will accomplish this by:

  • Identifying and analyzing the systemic factors that created this dismal system
  • Researching promising models and educational interventions
  • Mobilizing the Community to address issues in the public education arena
  • Working to develop structures to train teachers in the most current education modalities, with an emphasis on cultural competency
  • Creating a village culture or ethos which reinforces the importance of education
  • Creating and maintaining dual tracks in high schools – one: in preparation for college and the other – preparation for a successful career in the skilled trades; while ensuring the mental and material equality of both tracks.

Economic Development

”In a real sense all life is interrelated.
The agony of the poor enriches the rich.
We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother.
Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

UAAMAC’S goal in this effort is to provide economic stability for the southeast San Diego Community by supporting, both personally and collectively the:

  • Building of stores shops and other businesses from which we mutually benefit
  • Efforts to create and maintain livable wage employment
  • Creating of appropriate structures that hold accountable financial institutions based on their equitable treatment of our citizens
  • Monitoring of public works projects to ensure the equitable distribution of our tax dollars