PATH Priorities

As part of our 2025 listening campaign, PATH listened to more than 700 people in 12 institutions—including synagogues, churches, a mosque, a school, and a union. Facilitators asked participants, “What is keeping you and your family from thriving?”

Based on what we heard in our listening sessions, PATH is prioritizing the following issues as we hold candidates accountable and organize campaigns.

Housing—Housing costs affect members of all of our institutions and are a profound difficulty in our community. We want to see more housing of more types, more housing affordability, and more support for renters in the county.

Immigration—We want our elected officials to take action and provide leadership in support of immigrants’ legal and human rights and compassionate treatment. We are committed, ourselves, to providing assistance and solidarity to people impacted by current immigration action.

Youth—We want our youth to have hope in the future, strong education and employment opportunities, mental health access and affordable housing options in our community. 

Healthcare—Many of us are struggling with insurance costs, prescription costs, and accessing the general and mental health care we need. We want every member of our community to be able to live a healthy life.

Food security—Many in our institutions and community are stressed about food costs and increasingly struggling to be food secure. As federal resources have diminished, we want a stronger food safety net for local people. 

Fighting division/polarization/cruelty/hate—We are greatly concerned about a climate of political division and culture of indifference and cruelty, including mistreatment of and use of religious communities in politics. We are also concerned about great reductions in conversations on race in America and erasure of African-American history and experience. We will stand against and work against discrimination on the basis of otherness, including but not limited to antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, and anti-immigrant sentiment. 

Notes

• These are our county-level priorities. We will be in dialogue with our Maryland Just Power Alliance partner organizations and engaging on state-level work on these and related topics.

• PATH has a long history of successfully working on environmental and climate issues. While environmental issues were not named as a top issue in this 2025-2026 listening campaign, environmental concerns are connected to many of the priorities above. We will look for ways to incorporate environmental values into our work on these related concerns.

• While these issues will be a primary focus in the next few years, members of PATH institutions can always work with organizers to explore issues related to and different from those above and propose action to our Countywide Action Team.

• While we will be active on all of these priorities over the next few years, we won’t be running campaigns on all of them at the same time.