Event details
- April 8, 2025
- 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
- Performing Arts Center in the Charlottesville High Schoo
The Nehemiah Action is the largest interfaith gathering in Charlottesville, organized by the group IMPACT that UUCville helped to establish. This year’s social justice priorities are affordable housing and public transportation. Local politicians will attend and will be amazed at how many of us gather.
At UUCville, Kelsey Cowger is the chair, and she is also President of IMPACT over all, so we UU really want to show up.
Doors open at 6:00PM at the MLK Jr Performing Arts Center and the Action begins at 6:30PM.
TUESDAY, April 8 from 6:30-8:30 (doors open at 6).
At the MLK Performing Arts Center @ Charlottesville High School.
UUCville is supporting IMPACT all-out in March, with our Social Action Collection, and our drive to encourage our members to attend the IMPACT Action on Tuesday, April 8, from 6:30 to 8:30 at the Performing Arts Center in the Charlottesville High School.
Our goal is to have 100 UUCville members and friends attending the IMPACT Action. {But our Secret Goal is to have lots more UUCvillians there!!] This message is YOUR Special Invitation to attend the 2025 IMPACT Action “to empower citizens to create significant change through direct action.”
This year the first issue we are focusing on is Affordable Housing for low-income families and senior citizens, a quest we began in 2016!! But we do not give up. We keep on working until we win. We are asking the county to create a Housing Trust Fund with a budget of $10 million annually from dedicated funding sources.
The second issue we are focusing on is Transit Wait Times for Charlottesville buses, a problem that we first identified in 2021. Actually, the problem we first identified was CLIMATE CHANGE. But that was too big a problem for us to deal with locally. Climate scientists tell us that to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we must cut carbon emissions in half by 2030. We learned that in the Charlottesville area, transportation is the single largest source of carbon emissions, mostly caused by cars. Improving our public transit system so that more people use buses instead of cars is an important priority.
Right now, public transportation in our community is unreliable, inefficient, and often unsafe for people to use. To reduce wait times, we need more drivers. Charlottesville Area Transit (CAT) has 59 drivers and needs at least 11 more to be fully staffed. We also need more buses. There are at least 4 more brand new full-size buses sitting in the lot waiting to get CAT branding and radios. If we want to be a community that is serious about addressing climate change, we need to fully fund public transportation and stop being over-dependent on cars.
In 2023 we got the City Council to provide funds to hire 8 additional bus drivers. That was a small win, but we didn’t stop there. This year we are asking the City Council and CAT to hire more drivers and get more buses operating regularly, to reduce the wait time to 15 minutes.
The third issue this year is after-school childcare for preschool children in Charlottesville. I’ll tell you more about that later. You may have heard Kelsey Cowger mention it in the church service a couple of weeks ago. She has been one of the strongest IMPACT leaders promoting this issue.
Our congregation was one of the founding members of IMPACT, and we have been strong supporters ever since. I worked on the IMPACT research committees for the first two issues, and we have made important improvements over the years, but there is more important work still to do.