Co-Founder Constance Merritt in Louisville Magazine on "Home"

Co-Founder Constance Merritt in Louisville Magazine on "Home"

"Home is supposed to be a place of safety, refuge and comfort. But implicit in this 'supposed to' is privilege. If you have the financial resources and social capital to remain safe at home, pay for delivery services or have friends and family who can sagely deliver food to your doorstep, then home means something else entirely to you. But to the neighbors we serve at Bringing Justice Home, who are medically vulnerable, experiencing food insecurity and who cannot afford or access food-assistance resources, then home is a place where you may feel hungry and isolated." 

Bringing Justice Home is an all-volunteer Louisville nonprofit that fosters health and wellness of medically vulnerable neighbors experiencing food insecurity by delivering food and household supplies, facilitating access to needed services and offering social support. We engage the community in the work of justice through education, shared resources and building just relationships. We are committed to putting justice at the heart of what we do and bringing justice closer to home. We believe that, before it can be a reality in the world, justice must be a reality within each of our hearts.

In that moment when everything changes - when we are suddenly plunged into a worldwide pandemic, when an unarmed Black woman is killed in her own home, when trauma of any kind assails us in the place where we're supposed to be safe - we tend to hold on, hardening ourselves to absorb the blow, scrabbling amount the wreckage, determined to piece together some mythology of  home. But memory can be tricky. Was home a sanctuary, a fortress, a prison? A bucolic wedding venue? A brutal slave plantation? Was it the center of our affection or the margin of our fear?

Ultimately, home is where we come from and home is where we're going, but in the meantime, we are all more or less exiles here, journeying together. More than any place, home denotes a purpose, a faithfulness, a direction, a commitment to making space for kindness and , dare we say, love to move within and among us, bringing us closer to justice, closer to home - bringing us closer. Yes, home is where we come from and home where we're going, but in the desert, in the mean, mean times, love is the only way station and the only conveyance able to carry us home.

We hope you'll join us in Bringing Justice Home.

Published in Louisville Magazine September 2022 (Vol 73, Num2)