Mission & History
BRIDGES equips people with the awareness, the skills, and the opportunity to develop relationships that will engage and transform our environment into a fair and just community.BRIDGES for a Just Community - our community's leading human relations organization - was launched on November 17, 2006 as an independent organization to better serve its mission of achieving inclusion, equity and justice for all and is governed by a group of prominent civic leaders. Our name preserves our legacy to justice and community while bridges - building bridges - provides an image for our human relations work.
BRIDGES has served the local community since its founding in 1944 as a regional office of The National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ). NCCJ was founded in 1927 by Roger Williams Strauss, Jane Addams, Benjamin Cardozo and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes for the Advancement of Justice, Amity and Peace to bring diverse people together to address interfaith divisions, in particular the religious intolerance directed toward Alfred E. Smith, a Catholic and Governor of New York, when he ran for President of the United States. We are proud of this heritage and remain true to these ideals today.
Over the course of our 60-year history and in response to the changing social dynamics of society, BRIDGES has grown from an interfaith agenda to one that successively added equal rights and inclusion on the basis of race, gender/ gender identity, ethnicity, religion, physical/mental abilities, sexual orientation and economic status. Each new issue was promoted by a group's desire to be included in society and its appeal to BRIDGES for help in removing the unjust barriers to inclusion. In 1998 NCCJ changed from "Christians and Jews" to "Community and Justice" to better reflect the breadth and depth of its mission, the growing diversity of our country and our need to be more inclusive.
BRIDGES is a founding member of the new National Federation for Just Communities, a coalition of like-minded organizations that supports its member organizations in the human relations work of building community by advancing inclusion & justice throughout the United States.
