Green Sanctuary Candidacy Approved

The UUFA has been accepted for candidacy to the UUA Green Sanctuary Program; the letter is attached as in both Word and pdf formats. 

The text of the acceptance letter reads as follows:

With this letter, the Unitarian Universalist Association, Office of Congregation Stewardship Services is very pleased to formally welcome the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames as a candidate to the Green Sanctuary Program.  A Green Sanctuary Review Team has examined your application and is impressed with your plans for meeting the program goals.

Your organizing committee broadly represents your congregation and includes many very involved members.  The committee has assessed your environmental situation and developed a well rounded action plan.

Your environmental assessment format is adequate.  We are excited to see that you have included an audit of households in addition to your audit of the church facilities.   And we encourage you to re-do your congregational behavior survey after you complete or make significant progress on your Green Sanctuary projects as this will help you see what changes people have made in their lives.

Your proposed projects for the Worship and Celebration focus area are appropriate for meeting the Green Sanctuary requirements.  We strongly encourage you to plan the specifics of your “sustaining intentional earth-oriented worship and celebration” project.  This might be adding more environmental themes to your worship on a regular basis – this might be by adding songs, readings, candles, reflections etc and might involve working more with the worship committee and minister but we were unclear on your intentions.  We are really excited to see that you are culminating your symposium in a celebration concert! 

For Children’s Religious Education we encourage you to share your curriculums that have been developed with other UUs, perhaps one way to do this would be to partner with the UU Ministry for Earth in making it available to others.  We encourage you to continue to focus on religious education – why we do the things we do and how that relates to our faith in addition to how we care for the Earth.   We expect that your use of the Northwest Earth Institute curriculums for Adult Religious Education will be successful – the “Menu for the Future” curriculum will fulfill a Green Sanctuary Program requirement and get your congregation involved in the Congregational Study Action Issue – Ethical Eating: Food and Environmental Justice for 2008-2012.  We also encourage you to use the film Renewal in your documentary series.  Your congregation should have received a free copy of this film in September, if you cannot locate it, please contact me and I will be happy to send you another copy. 

We encourage you to revise your environmental justice projects to better provide justice for disadvantaged or oppressed communities.  More specifically, we recommend focusing on projects that will build relationships to create a greater impact. The environmental restoration service-learning project in the Yucatan Peninsula is a good example of a project where you can develop personal relationships with those involved and then find a way to share that experience with the larger congregation. Your AMOS project is almost an environmental justice project but it doesn’t seem to be at the point where you are working with affected individuals.  The Take Back the Tap project is more of a religious education or sustainable living project. If you want to talk more about options or alternative projects, feel free to contact me.  I would be happy to brainstorm ideas with you.

Your sustainable living projects are well conceived and straight-forward. We encourage you to monitor results and share the results with your congregation.  Additionally, we were excited to see that you plan on developing multiple policies that will change the way your congregation operates and ensure that you are in right-relations with the Earth.  Promoting and celebrating the use of local foods is also a good tie-in to the Ethical Eating CSAI.  And we are excited to see that you are removing invasive species and restoring native species.

Overall, your program looks diverse, well balanced, and exciting.  We look forward to your continuing progress as you work towards becoming a Green Sanctuary. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns as you move forward.  Congratulations and welcome to the Green Sanctuary Program! 

To a greener faith-community and world,

Robin Nelson

Program Manager, Congregational Stewardship Services

“It’s not easy being Green.” – Kermit the Frog