Some of you may know our good friends, Rick and Linda Ruzga. They have both been connected with the LIGHT! for many years back in the days when we had our regular ministry at the Milwaukee Rescue Mission. Linda was actually on staff with us for awhile and served as one of our pastors before she took on her current role as Pastor of Group and Women at Brooklife Church. Rick served with Rich many years ago when their day jobs revolved around GE Healthcare. Today he leads his own successful consulting firm helping companies solve some of their thorniest problems.
Anyways, we had a get together with them this past week and sought out their insight and guidance around the best ways to approach fighting inequality. For those of you who have joined us in our series at the New Berlin Public Library reading through “Runaway Inequality,” by Les Leopold, you know that this is one of the greatest social ills facing our country today. In fact, it seems to be related to so many other social ills like life expectancy, infant mortality, mental health, imprisonment, education, etc., that we’ve concluded that, if we can find a way to address inequality (defined as the gap between the average within the top 20% vs the average within the bottom 20%) across both income and wealth, we would see many of the other social ills start improving as well.
Where to start, though? There were so many things we were looking at like:
- Livable wage
- Universal healthcare
- Basic worker rights / care
- Investing in education
- Reducing the influence of money in politics
- Implement fair trade rules
- Eliminating non-societal benefitting loopholes for the 1%
- Revamping CEO pay
- Ending tax havens and corporate tax dodging
- Taking back our financial system
- Reengineer the corporation
- Redesign our tax system
Then, you throw in the fact that these must be addressed at city, county, state and national levels and you have a 12 x 4 matrix of “realms” in which to play!
Thankfully, we had some very insightful guidance from Rick and Linda!
To make a long story short their advice was to focus on #4 and #5 (Education and Campaign Finance Reform). We can begin with addressing Education at the grassroots and local level. With Campaign Finance Reform we could investigate that at the national level. As I thought more about this I would also look at #11, (Reengineering the corporation) given my experience there on driving “Conscious Capitalism.”
Their advice was refreshing and made a lot of sense. It helped us gain more clarity and focus as to where we will guide the LIGHT! over the next decade (possibly more!) to fight inequality.
Thanks, R&L, we love you guys!