Interfaith Initiative of Santa Barbara County advocates a virtuous approach to providing human services and reducing our carbon footprint by placing social and environmental justice at the center of everyday living and decision-making.
We invite you to convene and catalyze with us by coming up with new ways to engage and build trust with our neighbors in a collective effort to address environmental and socioeconomic poverty issues. We organize our work around Compassion in two ways:
Compassion In My Back Yard (CIMBY) is our notion of creating centers where people of all faiths and those who are spiritually independent have a place to lend care and compassion at a micro-local, neighborhood level. We aim to pair the desire to serve with the needs of the most vulnerable, and our goal is to transform the tradition of direct charity into opportunities to share and empower while ensuring participation is open to anyone, so that an entire community can participate alongside people with congregational affiliation. CIMBY offers viable solutions that combine tangible and behavioral change regarding environmental sustainability and homelessness by addressing root symptoms at the same time.
Compassionate City Charter Imagine cities around the world working on Compassionate initiatives and thousands of agencies transforming social programs with new approaches to serving human and ecological needs. The Charter for Compassion has grown 300 percent in recent months and IFISBC is bringing it to Santa Barbara because we believe Compassion has a measurable impact on human communities and the social ecologies in which they exist. IFISBC has started to dialogue with leaders in our community about the need for a focused hub to spur values-based planning, and our goal is to be that connective tissue.
IFI’s Compassion Committee meets regularly. Please join us!
