Inbox Reflections: September 2025

A Monthly Digest of Messages Shaping Our Movement

Each month, our inbox carries reflections from partners, organizers, and community leaders. These are not just updates—they are living reminders of the many ways our city and communities are in motion. By receiving them, and sharing our own perspective alongside, we offer an invitation: to notice, to feel, and to see what arises in us together.

⚡ Energy Justice is Housing Justice

From Jesse for Indy Jesse Brown continues to raise the alarm on AES’s $24.7M annual rate hike. For too many Hoosiers, a jump in utility costs isn’t just an inconvenience—it can be the difference between keeping or losing a home. Jesse frames this fight as one of fairness and accountability, calling on residents to speak into the process.

➡️ AFH Reflection: We recognize energy justice as deeply tied to housing justice. When a family cannot afford heat or light, it is not just a utility issue—it is a matter of belonging and survival. By holding these systems accountable, we open space for more neighbors to remain rooted in their homes and communities.

🕌 Faith in Action: Justice, Compassion & Accountability

From Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance (GIMA) GIMA has been lifting justice and compassion as shared values across faith traditions through its Sacred Friendships dialogues, while also amplifying efforts like Streets to Home Indy and Fran Quigley’s Lessons from Eviction Court. These efforts point to the deep moral urgency of addressing housing and homelessness in our city.

➡️ AFH Reflection: We are grateful for GIMA’s commitment to housing justice and interfaith solidarity. At the same time, we believe accountability means ensuring that planning spaces like the Streets to Home Indy meetings are open to the public. These decisions involve public money and shape public futures, and the community deserves not only to benefit from the outcomes but to participate in the process.

Public solutions cannot be crafted behind closed doors. True justice requires transparency, openness, and co-creation. When communities are invited in, we not only build better policies—we strengthen the bonds of trust and belonging that sustain us all.

✊ Building Solidarity, Building Power

From Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) is inviting communities into their Organize in Solidarity training series, a space designed to build grassroots circles rooted in racial and economic justice. The focus is not only on strategy, but on practicing accountability and learning together in community.

➡️ AFH Reflection: This mirrors our approach—recognizing that transformation does not arrive all at once or in one way. It emerges as we listen, act, and reflect together. Each circle of voices adds depth to the collective movement for dignity and justice.

🌟 A Shared Unfolding

What we find in these messages is not a single story or a neat solution, but threads weaving into something larger. Energy bills, eviction courts, interfaith circles, grassroots trainings—they are all reflections of the same truth: we are interconnected.

At Allies for Humanity, we witness these voices with gratitude and offer our own perspective as an invitation. Not to prescribe, not to divide, but to co-create. Each insight—whether it stirs the body with a feeling of truth or lights the mind with clarity—becomes part of a shared unfolding.

In this way, we are not rising or falling together; we are discovering and remembering together, shaping a future rooted in belonging.