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Staff Board Report
October 11th, 2022
Introduction
Hello Dear Board,
I am sending you all love and gratitude here in the midst of the turning leaves and pumpkin spice everything all around.
We are off to a wonderful beginning of the church year. Our first outdoor service was blustery and beautiful. Our indoor 9:00 and 11:00 worships are back in full swing and vespers services have returned with their depth and peaceful grounding.
Our wonderful new intern John has joined the team seamlessly and is a wonderful addition. Janice has landed in the mountains of Vermont and has transitioned to mostly distanced work and we are all reimagining together what the space is, what it is for and how to configure our time and collaboration.
And we have lots of new folks coming. We have twenty-five new kids in the musical, which is wonderful. And this is coupled with a steady stream of visitors on Sundays as well as a healthy return of familiar faces we haven’t seen in a while.
Our programs are gearing up with the youth group and kids RE starting and seeing slow registrations but solid attendance and wonderful enthusiasm. Our adult programs are robust and the offerings engaging. People are slow to sign up but hungry to participate.
So we start this year in a great place.
Here in the next part of this report, I will discuss our newly reconfigured staff team, I will touch on potential models for deepening our partnerships with our affiliate organizations, I will give some updates on two of our wider UU world projects, I will discuss a potential plan for shepherding the conversations around bathrooms and our welcome and celebration of trans and non-binary folks in the congregation, and finally I will touch on Sandy Island and some follow up which is coming.
And then there will be reports from our wonderful staff.
Our Newly Reconfigured Staff Team
As most of you know by now, we have welcomed our new intern minister, John. He dove right in and is working great as a member of the team. You will hear more from him later in the report, but the addition of a brand new position like this is a big one, and it has been great so far.
We look forward to helping him nestle into the space and flow of our work as well as defining in particular his areas of focus over the next few months.
More on all that as it develops, but we are over the moon excited to have him on the team and to continue to work with students in the coming years.
Deepening Our Partnerships
As many of you know we have affiliations with a number of wonderful organizations. In particular in the last many years we have been looking at ways to deepen, broaden and strengthen our relationships with the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee or UUSC, the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry or UUUM, and the Unitarian Universalist Mass Action or UUMA.
All three of these organizations are wonderful, all three do varied and important work in the wider world, in our state and in Unitarian Universalism, and all three have small pockets of FCB folks who care deeply about these organizations and are deeply invested in their work.
In addition, the folks who care deeply about these groups would love for more folks to be involved. We have Sunday services dedicated to each of these groups every year. We also have shared plates at least one month a year.
In conversation with our delegates from the UUUM this year, we wondered about having the shared plates not be just one month, but having the organizations be shared plates for two or three months, and schedule not just the Sunday service with the visiting director, but another event during that time.
This would serve to both deepen our partnerships with these groups, and also provide opportunities for folks to be involved and learn more about their wonderful work.
Our Work In The Wider World
As many of you know we have two projects brewing which serve the wider UU world, the kids UUnited program and the Community Collaborative. I wanted to share a few updates about both programs.
Kids UUnited is off to a great start