As I reflect upon UUSJ’s conversation with Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis this past May (please share your own), I’ve been sitting with where my own activism and advocacy belong in the larger landscape of what must be done for economic justice. Her insistence that poverty is a policy choice — and that we are called to build systems rooted in dignity — continues to echo.

And alongside her message, the interfaith Covenant for Our Future has stayed with me. Its bold call to repeal HR1 after the midterms reminds us that democracy, economic justice, and moral courage are intertwined. Faith communities are not just observers of this moment; we are participants in shaping what comes next.

This is where my two worlds meet: as a knowledge management practitioner and a social justice advocate. These fields keep crossing paths in my mind because they both ask the same question:

Who thrives — and why?

Some further thoughts about this.

Knowledge Management as a Moral Infrastructure

Throughout U.S. history, progress toward justice has depended on intentional knowledge sharing:

• Civil Rights organizers used disciplined documentation and coordinated training to protect activists and scale action across states.
• Freedom Schools created replicable curricula to teach civic literacy to those long denied access to information.
• Black intellectual traditions used self?education and community knowledge?building as tools of liberation.
• Women’s labor movements exchanged organizing manuals and newsletters to win fair wages and protections.
• Immigrant mutual?aid societies built community?run knowledge systems — legal guidance, translation, navigation support — long before government services existed.

Each of these movements understood something essential:
Justice requires shared knowledge.

Movements endure because people document, teach, and preserve what works.

Today, as economic inequity widens and systems grow more complex, knowledge management must be part of our justice toolkit. It removes hidden barriers, makes systems navigable, protects community capacity, and redistributes power by making expertise visible and shareable.

Economic justice is not only about wages or policy. It is about whether people have access to the insight, information, and know?how required to participate fully and build stability.

A Call to UUs and UUSJ Members

As we enter the spring and summer season of activism — and as we absorb the implications of the Supreme Court’s recent decision on Voting Rights — I invite UUSJ members and Unitarian Universalists everywhere into reflection:

• What calls you into the work of advancing opportunity and dignity for all — and what knowledge, stories, or truths do you feel compelled to lift up so others can join you?  This is the KM practice of naming what matters and refusing to let essential truths stay hidden.

 

• How do we respond to the daily challenges to economic justice — the erosion of wages, housing access, healthcare, and democratic participation — by documenting what we’re seeing and ensuring that communities have the information they need to navigate systems that weren’t built for them?  This is the KM practice of making systems visible, legible, and navigable.

 

• How can we, as Unitarian Universalists, lean into the sacred work of LOVE by building systems of shared knowledge, mutual learning, and collective wisdom that help all of us flourish?  This is the KM practice of creating structures that hold and distribute power with care.

Economic justice is the connective tissue of all justice work. It touches racial equity, immigrant rights, gender inclusion, climate resilience, and the right to thrive in community.

Our faith calls us to act not only from compassion but from clarity — to make visible the knowledge, structures, and practices that sustain inequity, and to transform them into systems of shared power and shared possibility.

Justice doesn’t scale without shared knowledge.

And shared knowledge doesn’t endure without love.

May we continue to build both.