Read more about Canada’s fitness credit online at MacLeans.ca

A gym can be an intimidating place to tackle the difficult task of being healthy. Whether it is because a person doesn’t have the right workout gear, or feels culturally out of place, many people forgo the opportunity to embrace health a gym can offer.

That is why Jubilee offers fitness classes in familiar environments for low-income residents in our community. Churches and schools are often the cultural and social hub of life for families in the neighborhoods surrounding Jubilee sites. Because of this, Jubilee has had amazing success offering exercise opportunities to a population that would not be comfortable going to a commercial fitness center.

For a donation of $1, anyone can join a Jubilee class and start on the road to good health.

I feel like I had nothing to do with Dom’s success. I’ve noticed this is a constant, reoccurring feeling I have while at Chrysalis.  I work hard, but I feel like I am always just scratching the surface. In my mind, I am never doing enough. The gratitude I get from the population I serve, however, suggests otherwise. I find this feeling alternately inspirational and a little unnerving. Inspirational because I see that I can make a difference in the lives of my fellow humans, even if I don’t feel I’m doing enough. It’s unnerving because I can’t help but wonder why I don’t always try to work a little harder, or why we don’t all try to do just a little bit more for one another.

Addison Callahan, EUIP Intern09-10

Market Makeovers features the work of some high school students in South Los Angeles who have been working on three stores in their neighborhood as case studies.

For two years, South L.A. Healthy Eating Active Communities Initiative and Public Matters have worked with the students from the Accelerated School. The initiative, funded by the California Endowment, is an effort to reduce childhood diabetes and obesity. Public Matters is a California-based group of artists, educators and media professionals working on neighborhood-based projects.

– Mary MacVean for the Los Angeles Times

Expansion of Jubilee Sites
For many years, Jubilee Consortium based its program and community-building at three different sites: St. Luke’s in Long Beach; Holy Faith in Inglewood and St. Stephen’s in Hollywood. In 2009, we doubled the number of sites where we offer health-oriented education and exercise classes several times per week. Our new partners include Grant Elementary School, All Saints Church in Highland Park and Trinity Church in East Hollywood. We are especially excited about Trinity Church who, this year, accepted the invitation to become a member institution of Jubilee. Now, in addition to being a place where Jubilee programming happens, the community of Trinity Church also has chosen to embrace, as their own, Jubilee’s mission to make healthy and just communities.

Additional Classes
With new sites come new classes. When Jubilee began, we had about three classes per week, and not every week. Now we have over 35 class offerings each week. Nearly every evening at each of Jubilee’s six sites, you will find dozens of people doing aerobics, practicing yoga, dancing salsa, doing cardio-boxing, learning how to cook healthy meals, becoming more aware of health issues, and developing their own capacity and enhancing their skills for community leadership.

Operation Frontline
Last year, in partnership with the Share Our Strength and the Center for Community and Family Services, Jubilee launched a new program called Operation Frontline – Los Angeles. Operation Frontline is a hands-on educational program that aims to teach low-income individuals and families to prepare healthy, nutritional meals on very limited budgets. The six-week cooking courses involve professional chefs and nutritionists. Jubilee has already hosted four of these life-changing classes at its sites and intends to make the Operation Frontline classes a regular offering in the community.

Adding the Episcopal Urban Intern Program
This past year, Jubilee took on a new program: the Episcopal Urban Intern Program (EUIP), a year-long service learning project which aims to cultivate leadership capacities of young people. Each fall, EUIP gathers a new class of young adults from across the United States to live in community and to work for change in some of Los Angeles County’s most innovative and effective social service agencies. EUIP is part of the Episcopal Service Corps (ESC), a network of young adult programs within the Episcopal Church that work for social change and personal transformation through service to others. Next year, Jubilee hopes to expand the program and open a new community house in Long Beach for an additional class of interns to live.

New Churches and Schools
Jubilee is currently talking and planning with at least six other schools and churches, from Lincoln Heights to Downtown to Hawthorne about launching and developing programming at their sites. There is no shortage of need across Los Angeles County and more and more institutions are realizing the benefits of partnering with Jubilee to promote health and wellness in their communities.

Thank You
Thanks for you commitment to helping us make our neighborhoods life-giving, health-embracing communities where everyone can thrive. Happy Thanksgiving!

When I was in seminary, our very old, very thin, very traditional, and venerable Liturgics Professor always spoke in a very low voice. He enunciated very clearly or taking notes would have been an exercise in futility.

One day he quietly unfurled a story about introducing Sixties “revisions” to the Book of Common Prayer. After the service, a parishioner complained about a versicle in Morning Prayer – “let not the hope of the poor be taken away.” The parishioner raised his voice in outrage, “That’s Communism!” Our professor, in our class years removed from the incident raised his voice in frustration and said, “It’s the Psalms!”

The Episcopal Church has changed since those days. Debates on sexuality may dominate some people’s theological passions and the media’s need for a circus, but the Episcopal Church keeps committing itself more fully to the hopes of the poor, and July’s General Convention was no exception. In spite of budget cuts, the Convention re-committed funds to the Millennium Development Goals and the Presiding Bishop reiterated her commitment to respond to domestic poverty.

What the Church says perhaps mostly in prayer and in theory, the Jubilee Consortium enacts in practice. Those of us involved in the Jubilee Consortium know that the hopes of the poor are many, but they include health and well-being, and a yearning that the next generation not be swallowed up by violence or stigmatized by the pockmarks of poverty.

Those of us involved in the Jubilee Consortium also know that tying our lives to the hopes of the poor is meaningful but hard work. Tangible and effective responses to ethical and ethereal commitments are always remarkably tricky. As the Jewish theologian Martin Buber said, “It is difficult, terribly difficult, to drive the plowshare of the normative principle into the hard soil of political reality.”

Theories can be inspiring. The interchange of ideas can be fun. Words are easy. Conventions make statements. Churches make pronouncements. Making ethics break through the hard soil of life is backbreaking and sometimes spirit-sinking work. But that is precisely what the Jubilee Consortium does. We apply our faith, our ethics, and our commitment and bring them to bear in local communities, very hard places indeed.

“Communism” has been replaced as an epithet by other bugaboos, but responding to the hope of the poor was never about communism. It’s a matter of commitment. It’s the Psalms (stupid)! It’s part of our faith. And through Jubilee, it’s part of our life.