The following is an excerpt of a sermon recently delivered by Natasha Walker, executive director of the Unitarian Universalist Advocacy Network of Illinois at Unity Temple in Oak Park:
If we are going to stretch into new ways of being, we have to examine our old habits. In times of crisis, well-meaning faith communities often default to the traditional playbook of transactional charity: food drives, coat drives, write-a-check initiatives.
Direct aid is vital — feeding people who are hungry and clothing people who are cold is essential human work. When local groups like Beyond Hunger step up to feed families in Oak Park and Austin, that is life-saving work. But if our spiritual commitments stop at charity, we leave the root causes of suffering completely untouched, and we miss the opportunity to change our view.
Charity, in its traditional form, keeps the giver safe on a pedestal of privilege. It says, “I have excess, so I will give a fraction of my abundance down to you.” It creates a subtle, persistent hierarchy between the helper and the helped. It assumes that the goal is simply to ease the pain within a broken system, rather than changing the system itself. It treats structural injustice as a series of sad accidents rather than deliberate political choices.
True beginnings require us to stretch past that hierarchy and model shared power. The late Aboriginal activist Lilla Watson famously articulated the alternative: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
When we shift from charity to collective liberation, we stop asking, “How can I help those less fortunate?” and start asking, “How are our fates intertwined, and what structural changes must we fight for so that all of us can be free?”
When I look at our Illinois landscape, I am constantly reminded that nothing in nature survives alone. Life is defined by relational accountability, not individual accumulation.
Consider the native prairie grasses of Illinois. From afar, they look like simple, isolated stalks swaying in the wind. But beneath the soil, their roots go down 12, 15, 20 feet deep, locked in a complex, symbiotic dance.
The taller stalks don’t look down on the shorter stalks and grant them a benevolent donation of sunlight. They share resources horizontally through an interconnected root system. They pass nutrients back and forth so the soil stays stable. They hold the ground together so that when the storm comes, the earth itself isn’t washed away.
This is the blueprint for collective liberation. It is the realization that my wellbeing is bound up in yours. When a family in our state lacks housing, when an immigrant neighbor lives in fear, or when environmental degradation threatens a neighborhood, it is a tear in the fabric of our shared root system.
Look at how this prairie wisdom applies directly to our local context here in Oak Park, which prides itself on being an island of progressivism, a community with a rich history of intentional integration. But we cannot be an island. Our ecosystem extends right across Austin Boulevard into Chicago’s West Side, and outward to every corner of Cook County and Illinois.
When Oak Park works to implement its Climate Ready Oak Park plan, aiming to cut emissions and build green infrastructure, we have to ask: Is this sustainability just for our neat, tree-lined streets, or are we connecting our environmental justice work with the frontline communities in North Lawndale and Little Village who bear the brunt of industrial pollution? When we talk about greening 30% of our land through green infrastructure, are we doing it in a way that models regional environmental justice?
When Oak Park wrestles with “missing middle housing” and zoning updates to allow duplexes and affordable multi-family units, we are testing whether our commitment to diversity is just a slogan on a lawn sign or a willingness to share space and property value. True integration isn’t just about who lives on your block; it’s about who can afford to live on your block. When housing costs soar, working-class families, teachers, service workers, and young people are pushed out. That is a thinning of our roots.
And consider our commitment as a Welcoming Village. Over the past two years, when thousands of new migrants arrived in the Chicago area fleeing political chaos and economic devastation, communities like Oak Park were tested. It was local volunteers, faith communities, and mutual aid networks that stepped into the gap — providing emergency shelter, food, and human warmth. But temporary relief is not a permanent policy. Shared power means advocating alongside immigrant rights groups for statewide work permits, permanent housing funding, and legal protections through the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights.
We cannot thrive in isolation. If the soil in Chicago or Springfield is toxic, the prairie grass in Oak Park will eventually wither, too. We are one root system.
This is the heart of our work at the Unitarian Universalist Advocacy Network of Illinois. We transform individual acts of goodwill into a statewide infrastructure of transformative power. We take the spiritual energy cultivated inside spaces like Unity Temple and build a direct, unyielding pipeline into the halls of power. When we show up in Springfield, we aren’t there to ask for crumbs of charity. We go there to advocate for structural transformation.
When we fight for these policies, we are moving beyond temporary relief. We are shifting power. We are saying: “We do not just want to feed people in a famine; we want to stop the systems that produce the famine in the first place.”
I know that many of us feel weary. The scale of systemic injustice can feel overwhelming, and it is easy to slip into apathy or cynicism. We turn on the news, we look at national politics, we see the rollback of hard-won civil rights, and despair whispers in our ear. It tells us that the systems are too entrenched, that money always wins, and that our small efforts don’t matter.
But despair is a luxury.
If you are a family living in a neighborhood without clean drinking water, if you are an undocumented worker risking deportation every time you go to work, if you are an unhoused neighbor sleeping outside in an Illinois winter, you do not have the luxury of giving up. Cynicism is a comfortable stance reserved for those who have enough safety and privilege to endure the status quo without immediate harm.
For those committed to collective liberation, action is a spiritual imperative. Hope is not a passive feeling that arrives when conditions are good; hope is a discipline we practice when conditions are hard.
If this moment is unprecedented, let our courage, creativity, and willingness to collaborate be unprecedented, too. Let us stretch beyond what we have done before. Let us move out of the comfortable pews of tradition and into the beautiful, chaotic, life-giving work of movement-building.
Let us look at Oak Park not as a bubble of safety, but as a launchpad for regional justice. Let us support local efforts like Climate Ready Oak Park and Housing Forward, and then let us connect those efforts to our 34 sister congregations across Illinois so that our moral voice echoes from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River.
We were not made to watch history unfold from the sidelines; we were made to shape it. Let’s take chances, make mistakes, get messy, and organize our love into power.
And let us begin, together.