CAUSE - CAUSE

CAUSE: Creating positive change for nearly 10 years!

Check out a short video of our work and vision for just regional and global community!

CAUSE is a regional non-profit social justice organization. Our mission it is to build grassroots power to realize social, economic and environmental justice for the people of the California Central Coast Region through policy research, leadership development, community organizing, and grassroots advocacy. Established in 2001, CAUSE has become an important regional force for positive social change in the Central Coast of Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties around such issues as living wage jobs, healthcare reform, public transportation, environmental justice, women’s economic justice and creating a green economy. Working with over 260 sister organizations throughout the region, state and country, CAUSE has involved in our policy campaigns over 800 community, labor, faith and environmental leaders, and directly engaged over 18,000 individuals in local, regional, state and national public policy campaigns.

An outgrowth of the nation’s economic justice movement of the mid-90s, over the years CAUSE campaigns have directly brought about improved wages, and health benefits for over 6,000 working families. These policy campaigns have included the adoption of five municipal living wage ordinances in the region, a successful three-year community unionization effort resulting in securing a living wage, health benefits, and union representation for 2,300 predominately low-wage working women in-home support service (IHSS) workers, and the adoption of two Ventura County health care initiatives targeting uninsured children and farm workers.

While in recent years CAUSE has led a number of other social, economic and environmental justice campaigns in the region, including a successful campaign to defeat the development of a liquefied natural gas terminal off the coast of Oxnard, state and regional efforts to expand public transit to underserved communities, significant movement in the cleaning up of the Halaco toxic waste site in South Oxnard, as well as active participation in other national campaigns around such issues as national health care reform and comprehensive immigration reform, in the last year CAUSE has also come to recognize the need to scale up and to be more intentional in organizing to bring about much needed state policy reform.

Building from our years of experience and our long-term vision and mission, in 2010 CAUSE began a three-pronged scaling up initiative to expand our advocacy, organizing and electoral power building work into the six-county California Central Coast Region, develop a state-wide leadership development and community organizing training center, and increase CAUSE’s own presence in Sacramento toward bringing about much needed state policy reform.

Contact us to find out more about CAUSE and how you and your organization can get involved.