Mission

The Rehoboth Project (TRP) has been committed to meeting the myriad needs of the urban strata for more than 30 years. A major aim of TRP is to popularize and familiarize thought leaders and the larger communities and networks with the skills and knowledge to participate in advocacy, organizing, research, and the development and exploration of ideas using a cross-cultural framework.

 

TRP elevates empirical and evidence-based approaches while prioritizing relationship-building that sparks new and innovative collaborations and cut across discipline, identity, issue areas, national borders, and generations in order to propel more impactful work for all of us. We work with, although not exclusively, faith communities from many different religious traditions to put their values into practice to address the root causes of poverty and social suffering. We put an emphasis on promoting the agency and leadership of people most oppressed and marginalized.

 

We’re presenting a project as an experiment of research, organizing, and direct service delivered under full coordination. We call this Comprehensive Service Integration. This approach allows for multiple disciplines to share their work throughout the process, sharing and cross-pollinating andragogy in a way that respects best practices while challenging everything in ways that will tweak the process continually.

 

How Do We Do It?

 

With a strong framework built over the past several years, people have frequently turned to us with a key question: How do we create a world where the circle of human concern is infinitely large and ever-growing? Our answer rises from our work. Respecting the realities of an ever more connected world and seeking the life vein that runs through the entirety of humanity. We explore the kinship of marginalized and impoverished people together as one group with which we know we belong. We move in a way that raises our view of ourselves as powerful beings capable of deep analysis and powerful action.

 

We use programs, projects, and relationship-building to examine systems, models, movements, narratives, and institutions that either advance or inhibit well-being. We also explore and build a socio-political analysis of those who escape abject poverty through intense interaction. Breaking down habits and opportunities in people’s lives and working to implement a strategy for formation that points attention to systemic movements that might encapsulate and emulate their lives. We seek to personify stories at this moment when the world is rapidly shrinking, and people are increasingly inextricably connected through like experiences. People across the globe are interrelated through a set of misguided ideas that have removed countless numbers from the circle of human concern. We seek to affirm inherent connection to each other and our planet, welcome our differences, incorporate our shared history, affirm an ethics of human dignity, and work to co-create a responsive government and civic life that advances our common good for a shared future. All of this in juxtaposition to a prevailing wave of hatred and intolerance that manipulates anxiety around change and generates animosity that targets vulnerable populations. TRP will, from a centralized location, cultivate an avalanche of ideas that call communities to co-create responsive government, social response, and civic life that advances our common good for a shared future.

 

United States and Abroad

 

The Rehoboth Project is acutely aware that the issues across the globe serve to bind us all together in ways never before possible. We have been active in East, Central, and West Africa, as well as across the United States for over three decades. In our work with Faith in Indiana, we helped transform the entire criminal justice approach in Indianapolis. After interrupting the construction of a $1.25bn criminal justice center, we continued to the next step by presenting and implementing a comprehensive process that has resulted in a more than 30% decrease in Marion County jail population over the past 3 years. In 2016 Faith in Indiana trained over 1300 volunteers to reach out to 164,000 potential voters and moved 13.5% of the county voters to win a $56m/year mass transit bill, while at Eskanazi (Wishard) Hospital we helped to transform a 32% annual recidivism rate for victims of violence into 4.2% over a 4-year period. Finally, our work with Global Impact Leadership Alliance(GILA) has led us to Uganda where we are supporting the work of an orphanage on Bussi Island where 160 children reside after their parents have died, mostly from AIDS and our slum church in the Luzira district of Kampala in Uganda, that feeds and confronts the day-to-day drama of scores of people in the center of the city.

 

A Deeper Look

 

Innovations in transportation, access to media platforms, and expanded resources have shrunk the world in such a way that even the most remote corners of our globe are accessible at any time from anywhere within hours or even literally seconds. Our strategic attention has been focused on urban areas in parts of Africa and urban spaces in America and food security in general.

 

The intertwined cycles of violence, poverty, and incarceration globally are disproportionately felt in communities of color and, in particular, by young men of color. American cities are experiencing poor living conditions, higher poverty rates and disparate and devastating exposure to disease and death in ways reminiscent of what’s happening in cities like Kampala in Uganda. Farmers in the American south are being sold seed with poor output, excluded from lucrative land deals, and largely overlooked for farming subsidies.

 

We have come to understand that crime, underperforming schools, unstable family conditions, unemployment caused by business migration, and the lack of life-enhancing socialization opportunities for teens, the uneducated, and people of color, and a general lack of social ineptitude are common barriers to a high quality of life in low-income communities. According to the National Institute of Health (2006), ―issues of neighborhood quality have immediate practical implications on the quality of life one leads in the community. Hence, the lack of basic resources and quality healthcare perpetuates the hopelessness of individual poverty [which] is compounded by community impoverishment. (NIH, 2006).

 

We Build Power

 

Developing leaders among the people most closely impacted by colonialism, injustice, and inequality is key to our long-term power-building strategy and one of the strongest components of our work. At all stages of our work, The Rehoboth Project invites individual and corporate agencies. We also encourage and facilitate the raising up of voices of those communities most deeply impacted by the determinants of health that serve to mitigate against people’s ability to participate in and enjoy robust and productive lives.

 

The recent pandemic presented a perfect storm for the populations in these communities. The lack of financial resources, and poor health due to a general lack of access and proper education open the door for huge numbers experiencing, not only the direct effects of disease and death but the accompanying stress. We move in the midst of such an environment to politicize the atmosphere in these communities. TRP moves particularly in ways that vary, but generally include forming groups; bringing about social and economic justice, obtaining, maintaining, or restructuring power; developing alternative institutions; and maintaining or revitalizing neighborhoods, cities, states, and regions.

 

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