Our Mission
HOPE’s mission is to promote justice, fairness, and the dignity of people by addressing the root causes of poverty and injustice within Hillsborough County, Florida.
We do this by engaging and training community members to effectively act together to achieve long-term solutions to the serious community problems impacting our families and neighbors.
Although our membership is drawn from faith-based organizations, our mission is not to push religious doctrine. Faith is our motivation, not our mission; our faiths call us to discover and address problems in our community, and HOPE is a vehicle for us to act powerfully together.
Micah 6:8
“What does God require of you, but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?”
Quran 5:8
“Be just, for this is close to righteousness…”
Matthew 23:23-24
“You tithe mint, dill, and cumin, but have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced, without neglecting the rest.
Unitarian Universalist Principle
“Affirm and promote… justice, equity and compassion in human relations.”
Our Vision
The works of justice, mercy, and faithfulness are central to all of our faith traditions.
Our congregations tend to take faithfulness and mercy seriously: many of us attend worship services at least 52 times per year, attend scriptural studies, or go on retreats. Many of us help individuals in need through service at food pantries, mentoring children, and delivering food to the homebound.
Our congregations tend to have a harder time with doing justice. Justice addresses systemic improvements rather than directly serving an individual’s immediate needs; this distinction is important. For example, a mercy response to homelessness could involve contributing to a food pantry or running a shelter. A justice response would take action to address deeper questions like “Why are many families unable to afford a decent place to live?” or “Why are so many people with mental illnesses ending up on our streets?”
Individual people and individual congregations don’t do justice as well because we cannot do it alone. No congregation has enough power to effectively do justice— to transform systems— on its own. We need power to change big institutions like the criminal justice system, affordable housing system, mental health system. We can build power through large numbers of organized people— passionate, informed people that are committed to seeing a more just Hillsborough County.
HOPE is a vehicle for congregations to do justice through building people power. For people of faith, this means we can fulfill God’s requirement of us to do justice, just as we fulfill the requirements to be faithful and act mercifully.
