Bonita Grubbs, 1984 M.A.R.

Bonita Grubbs ’84 M.A.R. has been executive director of Christian Community Action in New Haven for two decades.  A not-for-profit  ecumenical social service agency, CCA’s mission is to express faithful witness in three primary areas: providing emergency food, housing and support to the poor in New Haven; encourage the poor to attain self-sufficiency; work to change systems that perpetuate poverty and injustice.  Under Grubbs’s leadership, CCA has established a number of new programs, including the Mothers for Justice program, a group of women from the New Haven area dedicated to improving the lives of families who are low-income; an internship program aimed at helping low-income persons obtain jobs that offer opportunities for advancement; and a Children’s Summer Program that brings together children from all CCA housing program sites for a six-week "camp" focused on the development of socialization skills. In 2005 CCA launched its Health Advocacy Voices Emerging Network (HAVENetwork) to provide people of color who are poor with the opportunity to share their experiences and have their voices heard as policymakers work to improve the nation’s  health care system. In an interview published in the Winter 2006 issue of YDS’s Reflections magazine, Grubbs said, “This is not just a job, this is God’s calling upon my life... The prophetic part of what I do is really trying to grab hold of this vision of what community ought to be, what society ought to be, trying to help us grasp the prophetic in a way that it becomes real, it becomes tangible, visible before our eyes.  It moves us from the reality of the human condition to the vision that we have for society that people so desperately need to hear in these times.”