A just Connecticut where all people have the power to live and thrive with dignity.
CONECT organizes a broad, diverse, and powerful mix of faith and community institutions to build relationships, develop leaders, and drive concrete change by uniting diverse faith and community institutions to address social, racial, and economic justice issues impacting our families, congregations, and communities.
Build relationships
Develop leaders
Dismantle oppression
Take action
Lead change
We believe people of all races, ethnicities, classes, and faith backgrounds have value and a voice.
By coming together across many lines of division, we can build more collective power to act in solidarity with one another and to act on our common interests. As an organization primarily made up of faith institutions, our many diverse and often shared religious values are an important grounding and guide in our work together.
Relationship Based
CONECT works hard to build relationships and trust across many lines of difference – including faith tradition, race / ethnicity, class, and geography (urban & suburban). This has taken on special importance during the Israel – Gaza war among our Jewish and Muslim leaders and institutions. We organized three rounds of dialogue circles to help Jewish & Muslim leaders hear from each other about their hurts, fears, misunderstandings and mistrusts of each other as a result of this conflict. While difficult, these conversations have also been powerful and important to keeping productive working relationships in place.
CONECT strives to be an anti-racist organization by analyzing the forms of racism and discrimination – individual, institutional, interpersonal and structural – and their impact on ourselves and our work.
Independent and self-sustaining
We are an independent organization, owned and directed by our member congregations and institutions, which sustain us through annual dues. To ensure our independence, we do not accept government funding. Instead, we seek individual donations and foundation grants that align with our mission and agenda.
CONECT addresses issues and campaigns pragmatically, avoiding ideological or partisan viewpoints. We do not endorse candidates or political parties. Instead, we collaborate with public and private sector leaders to find concrete and practical solutions to the challenges facing our communities.
Small-d democratic
We believe that our cities, towns, state, and country are strengthened when more people engage in the democratic process. While voting is a vital first step, it is only the beginning. We believe in reclaiming democracy and politics as honorable pursuits, where people can unite to improve their communities and their nation. We utilize existing avenues and strive to create new ones for individuals from all backgrounds to participate in democracy, have their voices heard, and ensure their concerns are meaningfully addressed.
We believe in the power of people to speak and act for themselves. We also believe that no one else can speak to any issue better than those directly impacted by it. Thus, we look to organize people to take responsibility to act on the issues they are impacted by, to tap into our collective power by having others act in solidarity with them, and to create a culture of accountability where we hold ourselves and others accountable to do what we say we are going to do.
