WHO WE ARE

MOSES is a community-organizing nonprofit serving residents of Detroit, Michigan, and its surrounding metropolitan region. We support the development of strong grassroots leaders and facilitate campaigns to address social justice issues.

We organize Detroit Metro communities to deal with burning social justice issues. We find and coach strong grassroots leaders and mount broad coalitions. We pinpoint exactly who has the power to change public policy for the better, and we get good things done for the common good.

OUR VISION

MOSES will be widely recognized as the most effective, influential, and diverse grassroots organization in Michigan.

OUR MISSION

The Mission of MOSES is to organize communities, develop faith-based leaders and build relationships to advocate for social justice through a group of diverse congregations. MOSES accomplishes this through training leaders in churches, synagogues, and mosques, teaching participants how to articulate their shared values and work with their constituents to take collective action in the public arena.

OUR 5 PILLARS OF FIRE

In Exodus, Our Lord provided the followers of Moses with a pillar of fire to guide them through the night in order to reach the promised land more quickly.  Our main five pillars (goals) have been distilled from the experience of our past 25 years. 

All are infused with deep care for racial equity and aggressive civic engagement.


  • All persons need the means to take care of themselves and their loved ones without being exploited, dominated, injured, or abused.

    Firstly, it means having equitable access to effective educational and training opportunities.

    It means having equitable access to good-paying jobs in safe workplaces, the right to organized labor, and strong protections from abuse and discrimination.

    It means providing strong safety nets during economic downturns.

    And it means recognizing the crucial role that parents and caregivers play in our society and economy.

  • MOSES fights for access in every neighborhood to affordable preventive and adequate health care, mental health and substance abuse care, and for pure and affordable water. It fights for fair taxation and rental housing protections.

  • MOSES supports public policies which make much less use of license suspension, and jail and prison time to deter offenders and which enable the savings realized from those very expensive and ineffective practices to be devoted instead to restorative justice options, such as community service, victim-offender mediation, civil offense diversion, tethered parole and agreed upon reparations.

    MOSES supports school policies that minimize the use of suspensions and expulsions to correct misbehavior, and which instead foster personal accountability and academic success.

    MOSES trains and organizes citizens to watch both civil and criminal court cases for questionable and/or discriminatory justice system practices.

  • We engage and train grassroots citizens in-depth on how public decisions are made, on who makes them, and on just how they can impact those decisions.

    We engage and train grassroots activists on how best to organize an independent political action committee within their church, synagogue, mosque, or neighborhood to research and advise people whom they know, and who trust their advice, on those obscure but important issues and offices at the bottom of the ballot.

    We work all of our established connections to Get Out The Vote (GOTV). We organize public forums and workshops on elections. We train folks on how best to observe compliance with precinct election requirements and on post-election counting. We advocate for sufficient budgets to enable quick and convenient voting locations. We engage all of our member groups to become voter hubs and to help voters obtain absentee/early ballots.

    We work with state-wide coalitions to protect our rights to vote and to prevent voter suppression.

  • We have long championed the development of a regional mass transit system which is equal to those found in other more affluent and successful cities, such as Washington, D.C., or San Francisco.

    We have more recently championed more equitable and more equitable and affordable pure water supply, drainage, and sewage processing systems

    Past public and private sector policies on land use, highways, property insurance, bank financing restrictions, mass transit, and other infrastructure development have together produced an impoverished ghetto in Detroit.

    The recent federal Infrastructure Authorization Act provides a promising opportunity to reverse some of that long lingering benign neglect.

    MOSES calls upon the Biden Administration and the State of Michigan for companion efforts to educate, train and qualify thousands of Detroiters entrapped in this ghetto for the expanded workforce that will be needed to complete these massive works over the next decade. This priority needs to be written into the very first release of the rules and regulations for the implementation of this Act.