Fighting For A More Just World: An Interview With The Ignatian Solidarity Network

By Sahid Fawaz

Chris Kerr is the Executive Director of the Ignatian Solidarity Network, which is a US-based national social justice education and advocacy organization grounded in Catholic Social Teaching and the spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola. The organization, along with Ethix-Merch, co-founded the Catholic Ethical Purchasing Alliance to provide support to institutions seeking to integrate the principles of Catholic Social Teaching into the purchasing decisions of their church, school, college or university.

Chris speaks regularly at campuses and parishes across the U.S. about social justice education and advocacy, Jesuit mission, and a broad range of social justice issues. He is also a member of the Labor 411 Foundation board and a committee member of the Alliance for Responsible Apparel Manufacturing and Purchasing (“ARAMP”). Chris sat down with Labor 411 editor, Sahid Fawaz, to talk about the organization’s work.

SF: How did the Ignatian Solidarity Network begin?

CK: The Ignatian Solidarity Network was founded in 2004 as part of an ongoing response to the Catholic Church’s desire to call attention to human rights abuses in El Salvador that had included the murders of four US church women in 1980, the murder of a Catholic Archbishop in 1980, and then the 1989 killing of six Jesuit priests and two lay women who worked at the university where they were stationed. By that time, in the late 80s, it was discovered that not only was El Salvador receiving a significant amount of military funding from the United States government, the US government was also training thousands of Salvadorian soldiers at a US military training school at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Our organization developed out of the movement to call attention to that by the Jesuit order of Catholic priests. Our early years as an organization were really focused on human rights in Central America, and we invited young people from the universities and secondary schools sponsored by the Jesuit order of priests to come take part in the public vigils and protests at Fort Benning.

But, you know, as our organization developed, we started to integrate work in other issue areas into our portfolio, continuing to work a lot with young people, but also inviting them to learn about and to engage in advocacy related to immigration, economic justice issues, and environmental issues.

This focus on human rights in Central America allowed us a sense of how we would engage young people in those issues. And now we’re able to do it on a wide range of issues.

And that brings us to the modern day where we have a program like the Catholic Ethical Purchasing Alliance (“CEPA”) that creates an opportunity for young people and universities and secondary schools and other Catholic institutions to engage in promoting a culture of ethical consumerism on their campuses — a consumerism that not only protects the rights and dignity of the worker, but also protects the and respects the dignity of the earth in terms of how products are created. CEPA works to align Catholic institutions with ethical producers of apparel. And we’ve been excited to be able to do that with partners in the North Carolina textile region and with textile producers in the LA Fashion District through the Alliance for Responsible Apparel Manufacturing and Purchasing (“ARAMP”) project.

SF: And here we are in 2025, and El Salvador is once again front and center in the news.

CK: The six Jesuit priests who were killed in El Salvador in 1989 lived and worked at the only Catholic university in the country. El Salvador was a small Central American country, and so, of course, they don’t have a ton of universities, but they were living and working there. One of them was the president of the university, and the university was deeply involved, since its founding in the late 60s, with trying to bring attention to the realities of injustice through social analysis— through the academic disciplines of political science and sociology and psychology and philosophy—and really trying to help Salvador and people develop the skills to analyze what was happening to society, to uncover the realities of unjust being perpetuated by the government, and that approach continues to be an important part of how we approach our work today. We believe that it’s important for people to intellectually understand the issues they are engagingwith to be in a part of that understanding comes through their interactions and encounters with people who are the most marginalized.

And we really brought that mentality to the work with CEPA by integrating an immersion component into the program that allows young people and others at universities and high schools to come and visit a community where textiles are being produced and to meet the workers and manufacturers who are trying to operate in sustainable ways. Activism is important but informed activism, like bringing students to factories, is what makes systemic change. And we will be doing that this June a group of educators from Catholic universities and secondary schools will visit the LA Fashion District to meet with workers and to visit a production facility to learn about some of the organizations and companies that are promoting environmental sustainability.

SF: How many schools are involved with CEPA?

CK: There are around 20 at the moment, split roughly evenly between secondary schools and colleges.

SF: What are some campaigns that the Ignatian Solidarity Network is involved with now?

CK: In addition to CEPA, which has both labor rights and environmental sustainability elements to it, we do work related to the environment and ecology that is predominantly focused on working with Catholic secondary schools across the country. We have a network of educators and Catholic secondary schools that we work with throughout the country. We also offer a leadership program for students in high school. And we work with Catholic institutions that are trying to improve the environmental sustainability of their schools. We provide assistance to schools and mentorship support to them in that way.

Another area is our work on migration issues. We do a lot of work with young people who are undocumented or marginally documented themselves. We have a network of young people across the country, college age and older, who are seeking to be involved more widely with policymakers on the needs of our country’s immigration system.

And then we also host a series of leadership training and networking events for people of all ages, but especially young people, throughout the year. Our largest gathering, the Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice, is our annual national conference in Washington, D.C. each fall. Upwards of 2,000 people attend the conference each year for two days of learning, networking, and prayer. The third day of the conference is a legislative advocacy day on Capitol Hill. It’s the largest Catholic legislative advocacy of its kind in Washington.

SF: How can someone learn more about the Ignatian Solidarity Network and possibly become involved?

CK: Our website at ignatiansolidarity.net provides a wealth of resources. And to learn more about CEPA, visit ethicalcatholic.org for our most recent newsletter, upcoming events, and news about colleges who are involved in ethical purchasing.