Though it's hard for me to believe, my six weeks as your Minister in Residence are already over, and this Sunday is my last one with you. It has been an honor to accompany you for this brief time, and to hear your stories, struggles, and aspirations for this beloved community. You have an interesting and challenging road ahead of you as you navigate what it means to be a religious community in the post-pandemic world. You also have ahead of you the many ways you'll find to heal past conflict and navigate disagreements, and the large decision about whether or not to move in the coming years. I hope you'll let yourselves be guided in all of what's ahead by your sense of mission, asking (in one way or another), Who are we called to be together? What difference do we want it to make, that First UU exists? You have terrific people in leadership - both as staff and as volunteers - and I have great confidence that along with them, your next Minister in Residence and then your new Lead Minister will help you gain clarity and map the path ahead. I'm grateful to have joined my life to yours for this little time, and will be eager to see how your next chapters unfold. With respect and affection, Rev. Kathleen McTigue

Tuesday, March 29th from 6 pm to 8 pm.
​Join us for a discussion on white supremacy culture. Download the Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture.pdf. For the meeting link, please go to our Members Area.

Our thriving South Bay Food Pantry recently went through a major transition. While church activities were solely virtual during the first years of the pandemic, we were fortunate to be able to use two large FUUSD South Bay campus suites to store the dry goods, bread, meat and period products we distribute to the local community every Saturday morning, as well as diapers on Sunday mornings. With the upcoming re-opening of the South Bay campus, we needed to relocate to suite 105, a smaller space than either of the ones we’d been using. Having grown to accommodate some 300 households seeking food each week, how could we adapt our operations to work from this smaller space? And how could we make that move quickly, so that the South Bay worship and social spaces could be restored for in-person use ASAP?

Thank you so much for the welcome on Sunday, as I shared in the service, it was a true joy being with you. I was also very glad to be able to share some information about how UUSC is responding to the growing refugee crisis being created by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
If you would like to support this work, please follow this link to UUSC’s Emergency Response Fund. Gifts coming in now will be used to support both immediate response and long-term partnerships to protect and advance human rights for Ukrainian refugees.
In faith,
Rev. Mary Katherine Morn, UUSC president

PROGRESS: The reopening Team met on Saturday March 5 to review together what we currently know about Covid in our area and the direction things are trending. Based on our discussion we are ready to recommend the following:

• Worship services should continue to be outdoors and masked at least through the rest of March.
• Based on steadily shrinking Covid cases and changed recommendations nationally and in our area, we are comfortable expanding our worship services to include singing and social hour following the service.
• Based on all that we know about Covid transmission and our awareness that some among us still cannot be effectively vaccinated, we recommend that singing outdoors continues to be masked, and that social hour follow “airplane rules,” that is, we remain masked except when actively taking a sip or a bite.
• We recommend that our staff begin working toward an eventual return to indoor worship by reviewing all the infrastructure and staff needs to do so, knowing that after two  years away from what was once “normal”, there will be considerable logistical efforts involved in returning inside.
• Knowing that there are multiple levels of vulnerability among us and widely varying perspectives on risk, we will continue to offer livestreaming as an option even after our eventual return to indoor worship. At that point, we will also offer a third option of viewing worship services from the patio for those wishing to remain outdoors.
• We support our South Bay campus in moving forward at the same pace as the Hillcrest campus, knowing that there are also additional logistical concerns having to do with the Food Pantry. Our staff and volunteers have these issues well in hand.
  

On a key point about infrastructure, skilled people have set up a complex facility outdoors to livestream our worship services. Deciding to move indoors will involve rebuilding all of that in the meeting house. That's a huge effort, hard to undo if an upsurge were to force us back out again. So we're working first on more and more happening outdoors before services move indoors. We'll continue with the livestream option open to everyone, no matter what. We're a solid, loving community. This is a time of trauma recovery, but we're in this together and definitely continuing to make progress.