Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Declaration of Independence made a founding promise: that all people are created equal, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s the promise at the heart of the American Dream. Though the promise remains unfulfilled, the Community Action Network is committed to honoring it.
As our nation celebrates its 250th birthday, we at the California Community Action Partnership Association (CalCAPA) find ourselves reflecting on how the building blocks of our democracy are reflected in the work of Community Action. Community Action is a deeply American idea: that opportunity shouldn’t depend on the circumstances you’re born into, and that communities are strengthened when people have a real say in their own future. Community Action’s founding principle, maximum feasible participation, reiterates that local problems require local solutions. That’s why community members with lived experience hold seats on every Community Action Board in our tripartite board structure, sharing power and shaping decisions alongside public officials and private sector leaders. Community Action doesn’t deliver solutions to communities; it builds them with communities.
For more than 60 years, Community Action has helped hardworking Americans secure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, creating opportunities to achieve the American Dream. Our network exists to close the gap between people’s promised unalienable rights and the material conditions needed to exercise them.
Community Action strengthens the right to life and keeps Americans healthy. CAAs across California administer WIC programs, providing mothers and children with access to food and nutrition services; they ensure access to food pantries, providing necessities to rural pockets of their communities; and they offer nutrition assistance for seniors, through well-known programs like Meals on Wheels. Through programs like the California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal (CalAIM), our network addresses critical gaps in the social determinants of health by connecting people to housing, employment, food assistance, and healthcare services that support their well-being. When a hardworking family in Fresno can feed their children, or a new mom in Merced has access to perinatal care and diapers for her newborn: that is the right to life, made possible by the partnerships within the Community Action Network.
Community Action reinforces the right to liberty by building capacity in hardworking Americans. CAAs deliver early childhood education opportunities that help give children from low-income families a strong developmental foundation and provide childcare for working parents. Our network delivers job training and workforce development opportunities that connect people to employment opportunities and wraparound support, such as certificates and credential programs, internships and apprenticeships, transportation assistance, and childcare. They coordinate financial coaching and asset-building services that help families break cycles of generational poverty and further pathways to economic mobility. Liberty is when a formerly incarcerated father in Sacramento completes a job training program and lands steady employment. Liberty is when a mom in San Francisco can afford to take a couple weeks off her minimum wage job to attend job training for long term employment. Liberty is having the resources to achieve the American Dream.
Community Action uplifts the pursuit of happiness by empowering hardworking Americans towards economic mobility. Happiness is best pursued when our most basic human needs are met. When families don’t have to worry about how they will pay rent, keep the utilities on, or where their next meal is coming from, they are able to focus on their pursuit of happiness. CAAs help families meet their most basic needs so that they can pursue higher education or job training. Once physiological needs are met and families are more safe and secure in their employment opportunities, they can focus on building community, growing self-esteem, and realizing their potential. Pursuing happiness may look different to everyone, but Community Action provides stepping stones to economic mobility, allowing families to be free to pursue their American Dream.
The three pillars of the original American promise – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – like most things in this world, function in systems. When a mother has access to a diaper, she is providing a better quality of life to her child. She is providing liberty to herself, because access to diapers means that she can bring her child to daycare while she works. That work allows her to have more economic mobility, providing better opportunities and stability for her and her family to pursue happiness.
As we watched fireworks light up the sky from Eureka to El Centro, we celebrated more than 250 years of these democratic ideals. We celebrated the thousands of Community Action workers across California who show up every single day: case managers and outreach workers, Head Start teachers and weatherization crews, advocates and administrators, who do the quiet, essential work of creating systems to cultivate opportunities that make the American promise real for the people who need it most.
Let’s keep building towards an American Dream for all.