Mission

The Greater New Orleans Interfaith Climate Coalition acts as a catalyst to educate, empower, engage, and equip faith leaders and communities to meet our moral, ethical, and spiritual responsibility to establish climate justice and promote care of the Earth, and all that dwell here, through a faith and reason perspective for a healthy world.

First principles  

Our coalition, the Greater New Orleans Interfaith Climate Coalition (GNOICC), begins with the conviction that we are drawn together by a reverence for the sacredness of Nature. 

Core values

We aim to 

  • Realize the hurt we create through our out-of-balance lifeways  
  • Restore just relationships with our humanity and the Earth 
  • Rejuvenate harmonious ways for us to live that honor the sacredness of Earth

We humans and other creatures are brothers and sisters who share the same planet. As a coalition, we ground our identity in our faith traditions and in our intuition. We are beings of imagination and hope, inextricably linked to all that dwell on Earth. In the egocentric model that has dominated European culture and created such legal structures as the Doctrine of Discovery, humans have justified ways of exploiting other humans and Nature as an expendable commodity, much to the detriment of the planet, jeopardizing our very existence.  There is an urgent need to understand the delicate web of life and uphold the intrinsic value of all life — humans and non-humans alike.

Methods

We will only engage in nonviolent means in pursuing social change. We believe that the means that we use must reflect the values of compassion, cooperation, justice, respect and nonviolence that we seek to embody in a future sustainable world.

Affirmative Action

We are committed to encouraging participation by all faith communities of our local area but in particular members of those groups which tend to be underrepresented in the dominant political and economic system: women, racial and ethnic minorities, the poor, and minorities of sexual orientation.

Code of Conduct

We agree to participate in coalition activities and to engage one another with dignity and respect and in a manner that is consistent with our values.

For more about how we operate, see our Organizational Handbook.