EPICA Values

• From its birth, EPICA's mission has been to promote lasting peace in the world through the construction of just and equitable societies. We believe that all people are equal and deserve equal access to food, water, shelter, jobs, education, health services and a dignified life. We believe that it will be impossible to sustain peace in the world as long as a minority lives in opulence and over-consumes the earth's resources, while the majority of the world's poor do not have access to even the basics necessary for survival. We believe that God abhors such injustice and that the oppressed human spirit rises up against it. Peace cannot be sustained through the forcible imposition of political, economic and social systems that enrich a few at the expense of the majority.

• Because of this, EPICA has made a preferential option for the poor of Latin America and the Caribbean and has sought to be in solidarity with grassroots communities, popular organizations and movements for justice and peace.

• The poor of the Americas have organized themselves in increasingly diverse ways as peasants and workers, as peoples of indigenous and African descent, and as women and families. EPICA is committed in a special way to the indigenous and Afro-Caribbean peoples of the Americas and has supported these communities and projected their perspectives through our work in recent years.

• In the last decade, EPICA has also more intentionally developed a focus on women and gender-related issues in all of our program work. A recent grant to EPICA affirmed this cross-cutting emphasis and provided extra funds to assure that we can continue to make women and gender issues a priority in the next three years.

• Defending human rights has always been at the heart of EPICA's work and it remains so. Although the wars have ended, human rights continue to be violated in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean with alarming frequency and impunity. EPICA will continue to focus on human rights even as we increasingly make the connection between corporate globalization and the militarization that accompanies it. The issue of human rights will continue to be reflected in our publications, our delegations, in our advocacy, organizing and coalitional work, and in our work with the local immigrant community.

• EPICA believe that human rights also include economic, social and cultural rights. Our human rights work will increasingly focus on rights that are being violated by corporate globalization, crushing the poor through the heavy burden of debt payments; depriving small farmers of a livelihood through free trade agreements that favor global profits over domestic food security; violating the rights of indigenous peoples to their communal lands and natural resources; oppressing young women and children in sweatshops that destroy their health and the surrounding environment; and denying entire peoples the right to determine the course of their own development.

• Popular education is another growing edge for EPICA, as the most effective and democratic methodology for working with the poor and the excluded. Inspired by the work of El Salvador's Equipo Maíz, EPICA will begin to prioritize popular education methodology in our work in the following ways: 1) by translating, publicating and distributing more books written in popular education style, 2) by supporting popular education methodology as it is used in organizing and educating efforts of the Global South, 3) by promoting popular education methodology in our work with immigrant youth in the Washington D.C. area, and 4) by increasing the use of popular education methodology within EPICA as an organization and in our leadership style.

• Finally, as an ecumenical and faith-based organization, EPICA has always been uniquely qualified to provide faith perspectives—including indigenous perspectives—and to work with communities of faith and conscience. EPICA will continue to develop faith-based reflections on the impact of corporate globalization on the poor, unmasking the violence of the dominant global economic structures and institutions, and lifting up the values and utopias of the poor in their struggle to create just alternatives. These faith perspectives will continue to be part of our publications and resources. We will continue to build partnerships with faith-based organizations in the Global South, and we will work with faith-based advocacy coalitions in the United States to support campaigns for global economic justice and peace.